


Power Over Me

by watcherofworlds



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Batwoman (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Amnesia, F/M, Gen, Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover Event (CW DC TV Universe), Post-Finale, Reunions, Slight Canon Divergence, Spectre Oliver Queen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 26,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23959876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watcherofworlds/pseuds/watcherofworlds
Summary: You got that power over me, my myThe only one I know, the only one on my mind...It begins with a whisper in Oliver's mind- "It's time". Time for his partnership with the Spectre to come to an end, and Jim Corrigan is summoned to make him an offer- should he so choose, Oliver can allow the Spectre to return to Corrigan and he can return to Earth and his family. As has always been the case with those he loves, for Oliver there is no choice to make, and he readily agrees.But something goes wrong with his exit from the pocket dimension, and he wakes up on Earth with amnesia. The only thing he can remember is a single name- Felicity.Then he wanders into Wayne Tower to find someone who recognizes him, and things get even more complicated.
Relationships: Luke Fox & Kate Kane, Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak
Comments: 243
Kudos: 191





	1. Prologue

_ It’s time. _ The whisper in the back of Oliver’s mind came from out of nowhere, making him freeze in the middle of arranging the photographs on the desk in front of the window. The Spectre hadn’t spoken to him in months, not since the Crisis had ended.

“Time for what?” he asked. As if in answer, a breach opened where the door of the office would have been in real life, and Jim Corrigan stepped through.

“Time for your partnership with the Spectre to come to an end,” he said. For a moment, his eyes seemed to glow green, as they had when they’d first encountered each other, down in Purgatory, and coils of green mist curled around his feet.

“I...I don’t understand,” Oliver said haltingly. It had been so long since he had carried on an actual conversation with anything besides the voice of the Spectre inside his head, and since even that had been silent recently, he felt out of practice and struggled to get his words out.

“I’ve come to make you an offer,” Corrigan replied. His tone was smooth and unhurried in a way that Oliver recognized. It was difficult to feel hurried or rushed about anything when you’d had access to nearly limitless amounts of cosmic power, when you’d watched the universe unfolding before your very eyes.

“What kind of offer?” he asked, speech coming more easily to him now.

“If you so choose, you can allow the Spectre to return to me,” Corrigan explained, “and you can go home to your family.” Oliver caught his breath, holding himself completely, utterly still, unable to quite believe that he’d heard that right, and around him he felt the pocket dimension, which bent itself to his will so long as his will was in line with the Spectre’s, still itself as well.

_ My family _ , he thought.  _ I can see my family again _ . And not, he realized, his family as it had been, scattered and broken, separated by death and time and circumstance, but his family as it was now, as whole as he had been able to make it, his mother and his sisters, his wife and his children, all of them together as they always should have been. Corrigan may have said that he could allow the Spectre to return to him “if he so chose”, but he knew right then that there was no choice to make. When it came to his family, there never had been.

“I accept,” he said aloud, still hardly daring to hope that this was real. Corrigan nodded once, quickly, a short, sharp motion like the bobbing of a bird’s head, and Oliver thought that he looked just the tiniest bit pleased with his decision.

“Then let it be so,” Corrigan said. The coils of green mist at his feet began to thicken, rising slowly up his body, inch by inch, and as they did Oliver felt his connection to the pocket dimension and the Spectre waning. Finally, the mist disappated, and Corrigan was left standing shrouded in the green hooded cloak worn by the Spectre’s human host so long as the entity was active. He waved a hand and a breach opened where the doorway would have been, just like the one that had heralded his arrival.

“Good luck,” Oliver heard him say as he stepped through it, on his way home to his family.


	2. Awakening

The Spectre’s former host blinked slowly awake, feeling disoriented. He began to take stock of his surroundings, making note of everything he could perceive with his senses- traffic sounds in the near distance, blue sky partially obscured by a faint haze of smog above him, grass and earth beneath him. He was laying on cold, hard ground… somewhere. The only question was where.

With a groan, he sat up and continued to take stock of his surroundings, taking advantage of the new perspective. He was sitting in the grass in a public park tucked in among high rises and tenement buildings. Judging by the state of the rusty swing set a short distance away, nobody had set foot in this park in a long, long time.

_ Where am I? _ he wondered, because “park in a big city” didn’t exactly narrow it down much. A moment later, a much scarier thought occurred to him- Who  _ am I?  _ His general knowledge of things, of the world around him, was still there, but there was a blank space in his mind where his memories of himself should have been- all his experiences, all of the things that made him who he was, everything was gone. He didn’t even know his own name. The only thing he  _ could _ remember was a single name- Felicity. He didn’t know who she was or what she was to him, but he could tell from the way that his pulse raced at the thought of her name that she was important. If he could find her, maybe she could tell him who he was.

With that decided, he got to his feet, swaying a little as the blood rushed to his head, then picked a direction and started walking. He paused for a moment when he reached the boundary of the park, finding himself holding his breath. Once he crossed it, there was no going back. But he couldn’t stay here. He needed to find out who he was, and that wouldn’t happen if he stayed in this rundown park in what looked to be the bad part of town. Knowing this, he at last stepped over the boundary and continued on his way.

He didn’t have a specific goal or destination in mind. He moved forward only with the vague sense that he should head toward the area in the distance where he could see the buildings get taller and closer together, as well as increase in number. That was probably downtown, where it was more likely that there’d be someone around who might be willing or able to help him. Here, despite it being the middle of the day, there were very few people out and about. He’d only encountered about a dozen or so since leaving the park, reinforcing the idea that this was the bad part of town.

As he continued on, however, the buildings remained rundown, in various states of disrepair. Everywhere he looked he could see signs of corruption and decay, and he began to think that there was no good part of town. Wherever he was, it was awful all around, everywhere. The thought lit a dim spark of something like anger somewhere deep within him. How could this have been allowed to happen? How could the people of this city have just stood by and watched it fall to ruin around them? Why hadn’t anyone stepped up and  _ done something _ about it? Shaking his head like a dog ridding itself of flies, he forced himself to refocus. Angry speculation would get him no closer to his goal. What was past was past, and he need not concern himself with it now. He knew exactly where his concern  _ should  _ lie.

He moved on toward downtown at a brisk pace, his long strides eating up the ground. He walked for hours, and day lengthened into evening, the shadows lengthening and reaching like grasping fingers across the ground. Hunger gnawed at his stomach and exhaustion began to drag at his limbs, but he hardly noticed. He was driven forward by a desperate, relentless need to find Felicity, to find out who he was, to know himself once more. He could not-  _ would _ not- stop, no matter what.

He kept going, and evening turned into night, darkness engulfing everything until he had only the lights from nearby buildings and street lamps to light his way, though most of the latter were either out or dimmed to such an extent that it didn’t make a difference whether they were lit or not. Thankfully, he was finding that he had excellent night vision, the kind that came from a long time spent working under the cover of darkness. He wondered what that said about him. What it meant for the life he couldn’t remember. For the second time, he forced himself to refocus on the matter at hand. It didn’t matter right now. Nothing did, except getting to downtown and finding someone to help him get to where he  _ really _ needed to be. 

As he continued on his steady, relentless course, it occured to him that he should give himself a name, something he could call himself until such time as either someone told him what his true name was or he remembered it on his own. At the thought, a word rose up from the shadowed places in his mind where his memories should have been- prizrak. He had no idea what the word meant or what language it originated from, but something about it seemed to resonate within him, making something in his soul vibrate like a struck tuning fork. It just seemed to… fit.

_ Alright then, _ he thought.  _ So it is. _ And so, with a satisfied nod, Prizrak continued on toward his goal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who may be wondering, the name Oliver chose for himself, Prizrak, is Russian for ghost.


	3. Premonitions

Kate strode up the sidewalk toward Wayne Tower, the hobnails in the soles of her boots occasionally making a ringing sound against the concrete when they struck it at just the right angle. An icy wind blew up the street, whistling as it was forced through the bottleneck between buildings, and Kate pulled her jacket tighter around herself, but the chill she felt had nothing to do with the wind. Because of the paragons’ role in the remaking of the universe, they all now had a connection to it, and right now, Kate’s was telling her that something was off. That someone or something was in it that wasn’t supposed to be.

Kate had never been one to give in to superstition or fear, but experience had also taught her to listen to and to trust her gut feelings. If something felt off, it probably was. For the moment, however, she decided to put it out of her mind until she could investigate further. Arriving at Wayne Tower at last, she entered the lobby without slowing her pace, her boots clacking against the linoleum floor, and took the elevator up to her office. She found Luke waiting for her there, which in of itself wasn’t unusual, but the panicked expression on his face certainly was.

“What took you so long?” he demanded the moment he saw her. “I was expecting you half an hour ago! I was  _ this close _ to sending out a search party!”

“I needed to clear my head,” Kate said, deliberately not elaborating on what her head had needed clearing  _ of _ , “so I walked.” She paused, then asked “Wait, were you  _ worried  _ about me?” a teasing smile spreading across her face before she could manage to hold it back.

“No, of course not,” Luke replied. “I know you can take care of yourself. It’s just that Batwoman is one of the last bastions against crime completely overrunning this city, and if one of its criminal element  _ did _ manage to get their hands on her, or, rather,  _ you _ , well… I just think that that would be very very bad.”

“You know, you might have a point there,” Kate conceded. Luke nodded in response to her acknowledgement of the accuracy of his statement, looking pleased.

“So, what’s on the crimefighting agenda today?” he asked.

“Do we have any way to get ahold of someone at STAR Labs?” Kate answered with a question of her own. 

“STAR Labs?” Luke asked. “Why?” Kate shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just… had a feeling. It might be nothing. It probably  _ is _ nothing, but I just need to make  _ sure _ that it’s nothing, and if anyone is going to be able to help with that, it’s the team over there.”

“Alright,” Luke replied, though he looked puzzled. There was still a lot that Kate hadn’t told him about the Crisis and its aftermath, including the connection that she and the other paragons retained to the universe they had helped to remake. “I’ll see what I can do.” He disappeared somewhere for a while- Kate had never bothered to ask him where in the building he went to conduct his own business, thinking that it was none of hers- and eventually came back with a phone number for her- Barry Allen’s, who as it turned out was the legal owner of STAR Labs and whose phone number Kate was slightly surprised to learn that she didn’t already know. But then again, it wasn’t as if any of them had had any time to exchange personal contact information in all of the chaos of the Crisis.

“Allen,” Barry answered when she called the number that Luke had given her. His tone was brisk and businesslike; he probably assumed this was a work call. 

“Barry, this is Kate Kane,” Kate said.

“Kate?” Barry replied, and Kate could tell that the questioning note in his voice was more out of surprise that she was calling him than anything else. There was a pause on his end of the call, then he asked “Can I ask why you’re calling?”

“I needed to get ahold of someone at STAR Labs and yours was the number Luke gave me,” Kate explained. “Turns out you’re the legal owner of the place?” Her voice rose in pitch at the end of her sentence, turning it into a question.

“Yeah, Harrison Wells left it to me in his will,” Barry said. “It’s a long story. Anyway, what did you need us for?” Kate noted his use of “us” but decided not to comment on it.

“I just… had a feeling,” she said. “That someone or something is here in the universe that isn’t supposed to be.”

“I felt it too,” Barry agreed. “But any sort of breaching or inter-Earth travel should be impossible now that everything’s been merged together, and I don’t have any way to confirm that, what with Cisco off trying to track down all the changes that have been made post Crisis…” He trailed off, and a hush fell between them.

“You miss him,” Kate said after a while. It wasn’t a question; she had heard the ache in Barry’s voice.

“Of course I miss him,” Barry replied, not needing to ask who Kate had meant. “He was one of my best friends. And there have been so many times since the Crisis that I’ve wanted to turn to him for help understanding all of the things that have changed because of it, but I can’t. Because he’s gone.”

“I’m sorry, Barry,” Kate said, softly and sincerely. “And I’m sorry to have bothered you some nameless feeling of something being off.”

“You didn’t bother me with it,” Barry insisted. “I told you that I felt it too, remember?” Kate nodded, despite knowing that this wasn’t a face to face conversation and Barry couldn’t see her.

“Well, anyway,” she said. “I’ll reach out again if it resolves itself into something concrete.” A questioning note slipped into her voice at the end of her sentence without her meaning for it to.

“Alright,” Barry replied, the word punctuated by a  _ click _ as the call disconnected.

“So?” Luke asked the moment he saw that Kate was no longer on the phone. “Anything?” Kate shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said. “But that’s pretty much what I expected.” Luke gave her a skeptical look, having obviously been paying enough attention to her conversation with Barry to know that she wasn’t sharing everything, but he didn’t say anything about it, for which Kate was grateful. She wasn’t sure how to even begin to explain what was going on or the feeling she’d had.


	4. Encounters

Prizrak had learned something about himself in the course of his trek toward downtown- he was married. The night he’d woken up in that park, when his exhaustion had finally forced him to find somewhere to settle down for the night, he’d given himself a once over before going to sleep and had found two things- first, that his body was covered in scars that he couldn’t remember getting, and second, that he wore a silver wedding band on his left hand, polished and gleaming in a way that implied that he maintained it with an amount of care reflective of the depths of his feelings for the person to whom he was married. He wondered who it was.  _ Where _ she was. If she was worried about him. If she missed him. Whatever the answers to those questions were, Prizrak was sure he would find them soon.

Sure enough, as he continued walking, he noticed the buildings around him starting to get closer together as more of them were crammed into the same amount of space. He was getting close. Though his feet were sore and he felt weak from hunger, he forced himself to keep going. Quitting now, when he was so close to his goal, was unacceptable.

A short time later, when he passed a street sign that read “Now entering downtown Gotham”- which, at last, told him where he was- the contrast between it and what he’d seen of the rest of the city was immediate and apparent. The buildings in this area were in far better repair, the streets were cleaner, and there were far more people out and about, moving without the hurriedness that came with the awareness that there was danger around every corner and that even venturing out to go to work or run the most basic, essential of errands, might put you at risk. This was clearly where Gotham’s weather citizens congregated, those who could afford to pay to have someone else protect them and create the bubble of safety they so clearly enjoyed living in. And indeed, as Prizrak glanced around, he spotted dozens of people in uniforms, weapons on their hips, patrolling the downtown streets, people who were very clearly not cops. In the minds of Gotham’s wealthy elite, it seemed, the police were only good enough for those who didn’t have the luxury of having their safety personally attended to, and the thought that they could so easily and happily live within their bubble, oblivious to the suffering and struggle of those less fortunate than them, made him angry.

But he didn’t have time to dwell on that anger; he had places to be and help to find. As he moved further through downtown, he was sure that the people in uniforms- Crows, he decided to call them, based on the emblem on their shoulders- would immediately peg him as someone who didn’t belong there. However, the most any of them did was give him a once over when he got close to them, to determine whether he might be a threat, and then dismiss him when they decided that he wasn’t.

_ What did I  _ think _ they were going to do?  _ he wondered.  _ Gotham’s obviously in bad shape, but it’s not like it’s some kind of police state dystopia. _

The strange thing that  _ did _ happen, though, as Prizrak continued his trek, without any specific goal in mind except finding someone who could help him find Felicity, was that people seemed to recognize him from somewhere. More often than not, when he passed someone on the sidewalk, their eyes would widen with surprise when he got near, and they would open their mouth to speak, at which point he would pick up his pace and move quickly past them before they had a chance to talk to him, asking questions that he couldn’t answer. Once, he wasn’t quite fast enough, and he heard the person shout “Hey, are you supposed to be dead?” at his retreating back.

_ Who _ am  _ I? _ he asked himself for the second time since waking up in that park. Evidently, he was someone reasonably well known, judging by how many people had seemed to recognize him so far, and he was also- apparently- presumed to be dead. The more secondhand knowledge of himself he gained, the more confused and troubled he became. At the very least, now he had the answer to one of the questions he’d asked himself about his wife- whether she was worried about him. Obviously not, if she, like the rest of the world, thought he was dead. Before he could dwell on it too much, the dogged determination and laser focus that were becoming familiar aspects of his personality to him by now took over, driving him ceaselessly forward. He supposed if he had a more specific goal in mind than just hoping he could find someone who knew how or where to find Felicity, eventually he would reach it and finally be able to rest for a moment. As it was, he felt compelled to continue on until he saw a sign or had a feeling that he was finally in the right place.

After a while, he came across a greyish colored building with the words “Wayne Enterprises” written in blocky text over its front entrance, and then, higher up on the side of the building, so high that he had to crane his neck to see it, those same words again, this time beneath a logo of a stylized W. An image flashed suddenly through his mind of a giant blue neon-lit Q with the word “Consolidated” written beside it, there and gone in an instant, disorienting him. Shaking his head to clear it, he strode forward toward the entrance of Wayne Enterprises. No one tried to stop him. In fact, no one even seemed to be around to see him heading toward it in the first place.

Pushing through the double doors a moment later, Prizrak stopped and took in his new surroundings. He was standing in the building’s lobby, which was tastefully- and probably expensively- decorated in white and gold. Directly in front him, a set of stairs led up to a balcony that stretched across the room, open doorways visible beyond it. Elevators sat to the right of the staircase, and the whole room smelled faintly of floor polish and disinfectant, implying that it had been recently cleaned. 

He continued to wander around the lobby for a few minutes, his feet tracing over the diamond patterns on the linoleum floor, taking it all in. He was just starting to wonder if maybe he should venture to other parts of the building when, behind him, he heard a woman’s voice call out “Oliver?” He turned and saw a woman with short cropped dark, blonde streaked hair, dressed from head to foot in black, standing at the base of the stairs and staring at him with the same expression of shocked recognition that he’d been seeing on people’s faces all day.

“Who’s Oliver?” he asked.


	5. Dilemma

“What do you mean, ‘who’s Oliver’?” Kate asked. She couldn’t stop staring. This couldn’t be real, couldn’t be  _ possible _ , and yet the person standing in front of her was unquestionably, undeniably, Oliver Queen. Kate knew she could never forget the face she’d once seen roaring defiance to the heavens as Oliver charged a horde of uncounted numbers of shadow demons completely empty handed. That image was ingrained in her memory for the rest of her life.

“I mean that I don’t recognize that name,” Oliver said, confusion in his bright blue eyes. “Is it mine?”

“Yes,” Kate replied. “Don’t you remember?” Oliver shook his head. 

“I don’t remember anything,” he said, a note of distress in his voice. “Not my life, or who I am, nothing. The only thing I  _ do _ remember is the name Felicity, and whoever that is, I’ve been looking for her ever since I woke up in a park in the bad part of town a day ago.” He studied her for a moment, then asked, “But you’re not her, are you?” Even as he asked the question, there was a tone in his voice like he knew what the answer would be, and Kate almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of Oliver considering, even for a moment, whether she, an openly gay woman, might be his wife. But only almost, because he’d practically come straight out and told her that he didn’t remember that Felicity was his wife.

“No,” she said in answer to his question. “I’m not.”

“I knew it,” Oliver mumbled. “I don’t know how, but I knew.” Kate nodded distractedly in reply, thinking that he had a reputation for being incredibly perceptive, and that that must have been a deeply ingrained survival skill at this point, because it didn’t seem to have gone away with the loss of his memory. She pinched the bridge of her nose in preemptive exhaustion as she pondered what to do now, all too aware of the fact that Oliver was no doubt wanting to know just that. This was the last thing she had ever expected to have to deal with, today or any other day. It was shocking enough to find out that Oliver was alive after all the evidence left behind after the Crisis had seemed to point to the contrary, but to also learn that he had no memory of anything besides his wife’s name? That was something else entirely, and Kate could feel herself getting a headache just thinking about it.

“Is everything alright…?” Oliver asked hesitantly after they’d been standing there in silence for a while. Kate jerked in surprise at the sound of his voice, suddenly aware that she’d probably been staring at him.

“Kate,” she supplied, recognizing that his hesitation had been because he didn’t remember her name. “And everything’s fine. I’m just trying to figure out where to go from here. This is all very complicated.”

“Because everyone thinks I’m dead,” Oliver said.

“Well that and because you have no memory, but yeah,” Kate agreed, wondering how Oliver knew that everyone in the whole world thought he was dead, because she certainly hadn’t told him that. She fell silent again, still pondering. 

_ Should I take him to the Cave? _ she wondered.  _ Or would that be too much of a security risk? _ But as she thought about it, Kate realized that the Cave was the only option. There weren’t many places that a person with no memory and therefore no identity could go, and the Cave was livable if not necessarily comfortable, though she was sure that someone who had spent five years surviving on a deserted island would have no problem roughing it. What was more, having Oliver stay in the Cave would keep him close while she and Luke worked to help him recover his memories.

“Oh shit, Luke!” she exclaimed aloud, remembering suddenly. “How the hell am I going to explain this to Luke?”\

“What?” Oliver asked with a bewildered frown.

“Nothing, never mind,” Kate replied. “Don’t worry about it.” Jerking her head toward the elevators, she added, “Follow me” Stepping into the nearest elevator, she hit the button for the top floor, where her office was, and waited patiently for the doors to slide closed and for them to be on their way. It felt a little silly to go all the way up to her office just to get into another elevator right after, but the main lobby elevators didn’t have Cave access, for good reason. They certainly didn’t want anyone wandering into it by accident.

“So,” Kate ventured as the elevator carried them upwards, “do you have something you’ve been calling yourself? A name you’ve been using since you couldn’t remember yours?”

“Prizrak,” Oliver answered. The word sounded Russian, or at the very least Slavic. “I don’t know what it means, but it just… felt right.”

“Hmmm,” Kate mumbled thoughtfully. “Do you want me to keep calling you that, or is Oliver okay?”

“Oliver’s fine,” Oliver said. “Since apparently that’s my name.”

“Alright then,” Kate replied, and fell silent again. A few minutes later, the elevator reached the top floor and the doors slid open with a quiet  _ ding _ to reveal Kate’s office beyond them. She led Oliver out of the elevator and over to the shelf by her desk, moving aside the triangular glass case that held Martha Wayne’s necklace to activate the mechanism that moved the shelf and the wall behind it aside to reveal the elevator down to the Cave beyond them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver’s eyes widen slightly in response to what had just happened, but otherwise he didn’t really react at all. She wondered if maybe he had a similar setup in Star City, and somewhere deep down he remembered it enough to be used to things that worked similarly. Or maybe it simply that nothing fazed him anymore.

Shaking her speculative thoughts aside, Kate led Oliver into the second elevator of the day, both of them silent as it carried them down to the Cave. When they arrived and the doors slid open, Luke, who was seated at his computers, turned at the sound as had become habitual for him and immediately leaped to his feet in shock.

“Isn’t he supposed to be dead?” he asked, gesturing toward Oliver. 

“Yes, but we’ve got bigger problems,” Kate replied. “He doesn’t remember anything.”

“ _ Anything? _ ” Luke asked. “At  _ all _ ?”

“Well, I remember  _ one _ thing,” Oliver supplied. “A name. Felicity.” Kate wondered if he could hear the way he lingered on the syllables of his wife’s name. She was distracted from her thoughts by Luke opening his mouth to speak, most likely about to tell Oliver exactly who Felicity was, and she shot him a warning look, silencing him. She had no idea what the best approach to dealing with amnesia was, whether it was safe to tell an amnesiac details about themself and their life, or if that might cause them undue distress and thus it was better to just let their memories return to them on their own. She simply wasn’t prepared to deal with potential risks of straight out telling Oliver who the one name he could remember belonged to. 

Suddenly, Kate and Luke’s silent argument was interrupted by the sound of Oliver’s stomach growling. 

“Oh that’s right,” he said distractedly, as if he’d somehow forgotten, “I haven’t eaten in almost two days.” Kate chuckled at the odd sort of dark humor in that.

“Alright,” she said. “Luke, you help get Oliver settled in, and I’ll go get us all some food. Be right back.” Then she turned and stepped back into the elevator, leaving Oliver and Luke alone together and hoping this didn’t all blow up in their faces.


	6. Connections

“You remind me of someone,” Oliver told Luke after Kate had left. “I can’t quite remember who, but I think… I think he’s a friend of Felicity’s.” He carefully probed the depths of the shadowy places in his mind where his memories should have been, hoping the answer would come to him. It should have been enough that he remembered this friend of Felicity’s enough to know that Luke reminded him of him- or that he even remembered him at all, really- but it wasn’t. Oliver’s information was incomplete, and he wanted,  _ needed _ , more. 

“Curtis!” he cried when the name came to him suddenly. “His name is Curtis.”

“Hmmm,” Luke mumbled thoughtfully in reply. He was leading Oliver through the sprawling underground cavern that Kate had brought them to, and he seemed preoccupied with trying to find a specific area or feature of it. “Interesting that your memories are coming back already.”

“They’re not, really,” Oliver corrected. “I keep getting… flashes, scraps, but that’s all. I only remembered Curtis’ name just now, not anything else about him, and even that I suspect only happened because he has some kind of connection to Felicity, who I  _ still _ don’t know anything about besides her name.” That total lack of knowledge about Felicity frustrated him more than anything else. He could feel that she was important to him; he only wished he knew why. 

As he followed along behind Luke, he saw him falter at the mention of Felicity, just for a moment.

“You know who she is,” he said. “Don’t you?” At that, Luke stopped walking altogether, but he didn’t turn to face Oliver.

“Until we know more about your condition, it’s best that we don’t tell you details about your life,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer, and yet it also was, somehow. “We don’t know if that’ll cause you some kind of mental distress, so for now it’s better to let your memories return on their own, however long that might take.” Oliver didn’t think that he liked that, but he would accept it. For now. It wasn’t as if he had any other choice.

“Here we are,” Luke announced after a few more minutes, coming to a halt once more. They were standing in an out of the way corner of the cavern, tucked just out of sight of the area in the center of it where Luke and Kate obviously did their work, whatever it was. It contained a camp bed with a thin mattress, fully made up with sheets and a comforter, a larger wooden chest, presumably for clothes, and a bathroom against the back wall, a wooden screen stretched across the space to create at least a semblance of privacy.

“I’d better text Kate and tell her to get some supplies while she’s out,” Luke said, glancing around the space.

“Don’t worry about it too much,” Oliver told him. “I get the feeling that I don’t need much.” Luke nodded, then turned and walked away, back toward the center of the cavern, pulling his phone out of his pocket and tapping away at the screen as he went. A moment later, he disappeared around the corner, leaving Oliver alone. He stood in the center of the space for a moment, at a loss. There wasn’t really much point in exploring the space, since he could see pretty much everything about it from where he stood. Eventually, he wandered into the bathroom and found it stocked with basic toiletries, soap and shampoo and toothpaste, a towel hung on a rack beside the bathroom’s miniscule shower, all of it obviously unused. In fact, this entire living space looked like it had never been used, which made Oliver wonder why it was even here. It was as if it had been set up for some “just in case” scenario that had never come to pass.

He was just stepping back out of the bathroom when, off in the distance, he heard the elevator doors open and Kate’s voice call out “Oliver?”

“Back here!” he called in reply, and a moment later Kate appeared around the corner, carrying two paper sacks in her hand, the scent emanating from which made Oliver’s stomach growl in reminder of how hungry he was.

“Smells good, doesn’t it?” Kate asked with a small smile. Oliver nodded.

“Yeah, I’ve always found it comforting to know that, no matter where you go, Big Belly Burger is always going to taste like Big Belly Burger,” Kate said, handing him one of the paper sacks she was carrying. “It’s terribly unhealthy for you, of course, but I figure right now, since you haven’t eaten in almost two days, we need to focus more on getting your calorie intake back up than anything else.”

“It sounds like you speak from experience,” Oliver remarked.

“I’ve picked up a thing or two over the years,” Kate replied. “Nothing huge.”

Lacking any other convenient place to sit down, Oliver edged himself onto the bed to eat, flattening out the paper sack and using it as a placemat to avoid getting food on the bed. Kate hesitated for a moment before asking “Do you mind if I join you? Luke’s busy, and I don’t want to disturb him while he’s working.” Oliver gestured toward the spot beside him on the bed in a way that he hoped said,  _ Be my guest. _

“I’m surprised that Luke lets food anywhere near his workstation,” he said as Kate sat down. “There’s nothing worse for a computer than crumbs in a keyboard.”

“Now, that didn’t sound like it came from you,” Kate murmured, a worried frown creasing her features in a way that was becoming familiar.

“No,” Oliver agreed. “I think I heard it somewhere once.” 

“But I’m guessing that you can’t remember where,” Kate said. It wasn’t really a question when they both knew what the answer would be, but Oliver shook his head in answer anyway. Neither of them spoke after that, and they ate their respective meals in silence.

“Luke mentioned that he was going to have you get supplies while you were out,” Oliver said after a while, trying to break the silence.

“Oh, yeah,” Kate replied, as if she’d just remembered. “I just got you some clothes, since I know that everything else is well stocked and I didn’t figure that you’d fit into whatever Bruce left behind.”

“Bruce?” Oliver asked. 

“My cousin,” Kate explained. “The person who built this place. Or, found it and modified it, rather.”

“I see,” Oliver said, nodding. Then, as a thought occurred to him, he asked “How do you know that the clothes you got are the right size?”

“You don’t live as a woman, and especially an out gay woman, in Gotham for very long without getting really good at sizing people up,” Kate replied. “Literally, in this case.” Oliver nodded but decided not to pry further into what was meant by some of the things she had said. 

“Anyway, I left them with Luke,” Kate went on after a brief pause. “I’ll go get them in a bit. Luke and I need to have a discussion anyway.” Oliver nodded again, but didn’t ask what they needed to have a discussion about, because he already knew- about him. The pair lapsed into silence again, and a few minutes later, when they finished their meal, Kate gathered up their trash, got up, and disappeared around the corner, leaving Oliver alone once more.


	7. Self Discovery

“So what’s up?” Luke asked when Kate came to retrieve the shopping bag full of clothes that she’d left with him. She looked at him curiously, puzzled by his apparently out of the blue question.

“Sound tends to carry in here,” he reminded her gently. “I heard you tell Oliver that you and I need to have a discussion. What about?”

“Oh,” Kate said. Then, because she’d just been reminded of the way that sound tended to carry in the Cave, she mouthed,  _ Lower your voice _ before she said, in a murmur, “It’s time that we start figuring out a way to get a hold of Felicity. She has a right to know that her husband is alive.”

“Okay,” Luke replied in a whisper, taking the concept of lowering his voice perhaps just a tad too far, “but there’s no way she’ll believe us. I mean,  _ I  _ wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen with my own two eyes that it’s true.”

“Okay, so then we come up with some pretense to get her to come to Gotham, and then we  _ show _ her that Oliver is alive,” Kate said, still making sure to keep her voice low. “But she still needs to know.”

“Alright, I see your point,” Luke conceded. “I’ll get right on it.” 

“I didn’t say it had to be  _ you _ who did it,” Kate mumbled, hoisting the shopping bag, her original intended objective when she’d come over here. The opportunity to have a discussion with Luke about their next move had really just been a bonus. “But thank you.”

“Of course,” Luke replied. “Now, you go take that stuff to Oliver, and I’ll get busy seeing if I can find some way to get a hold of his wife.” Kate nodded and went to do just that, heading back to the corner where they’d left Oliver. She found him sitting on the bed, staring off into space and apparently deep in thought. He nodded to Kate in acknowledgement of her presence when he saw her, but didn’t speak. 

Striding forward further into the space, Kate knelt in front of the chest beside the bed, opened it up, and began pulling clothes out of the shopping bag, taking the time to carefully fold each article of clothing before setting it in the chest.

“Kate?” Oliver asked as she was finishing up and pushing the lid of the chest closed. She closed it the rest of the way and turned her head to look at him.

“You’ve already done so much for me,” he went on, “and I hate to ask any more from you, but-”

“Name it,” Kate interjected gently. “Whatever it is, I’m happy to do it.”

“Do you think you could find me a journal?” Oliver asked. “Just so that I have somewhere to keep track of the things I remember?”

“Of course,” Kate replied with a nod. “I can go and do that right now. It’s been oddly quiet tonight and Luke is busy with his own thing at the moment, so I was really just looking for something to occupy myself with.” She deliberately avoided mentioning that Luke’s thing was finding a way to get in contact with Felicity. They’d cross that bridge when they came to it. Oliver nodded in acknowledgement of her words, and she turned and headed for the center of the Cave once more. When she passed Luke at his workstation on her way to the elevator, he was on the phone with someone, the crease of a frown between his eyebrows.

_ Well, that’s promising _ , she thought as the elevator doors slid closed and it began to carry her upwards.  _ I think. _

It was only once Kate stepped onto the sidewalk outside Wayne Tower that she finally realized just how late it was. It was full dark by now, and in fact, a quick glance at her watch told her that it was nearly midnight. Too late to obtain her objective then, because she highly doubted that any stores would be open at this time of night.

Despite the unlikeliness that she would be able to get the thing she’d left the Cave for, it felt silly to just turn right around and go back inside, so Kate set off, heading away from Wayne Tower, hoping that a walk might clear her head, that a little bit of physical distance from Oliver and the Cave might help her gain a fresh perspective on how best to go about helping him get his memories back. Eventually, she ended up at the park where she and Beth had always liked to go with their father. Considering all the painful memories it held for her, she should have wanted to avoid it at all costs, but Kate found herself constantly drawn back to it, and this time was evidently no different. With a sigh, she sat down on one of the swings on the rusty swing set and pushed herself halfheartedly back and forth with her foot. Looking up at the few stars she could see through the haze of smog in the sky, she asked aloud “Why did you have to do this to him? You spared his life, but couldn’t you then have let him find peace? Wasn’t it enough that he saved us all, that he gave us all our futures back? Why couldn’t that have been the end of it?” 

Kate received no answer, nor had she expected one, but she recognized this as a pattern of hers. When she’d lost her mother and Beth, when Alice had turned out to be the sister that she had lost, when her father went to prison for her stepmother’s murder, every single time she’d found herself faced with unspeakable tragedy or hardship or pain, she’d come here and demanded answers- from God, or from the universe, she’d never quite figured out which- that she knew she’d never receive, especially since her return to Gotham. That seemed to have been when tragedy had entered her life in the greatest quantity, and try though she might, Kate could not determine whether that had to do with the miserable state of the city itself or whether it was a problem with her. With another sigh, Kate levered herself up out of the swing and onto her feet, deciding that she may as well head back to the Cave. She hadn’t gained the new perspective on the problem currently facing her that she’d hoped to, but she  _ had  _ learned something about how she felt about it all, and that wasn’t nothing.

By the time she stepped into the Cave once more, she found the computer monitors at Luke’s workstation shut off and the lights throughout the Cave dimmed. Luke had apparently called it a night, and before she did the same, Kate thought she’d better check and make sure Oliver had as well, considering how late it was. She headed to the living area in the back corner and found him sleeping, though not soundly- he cried out in his sleep as she came near, and the sheets on the bed were twisted around him in a way that indicated that he’d been tossing and turning, probably to the point of nearly thrashing himself straight onto the floor.

Kate frowned, feeling her heart ache for Oliver, knowing from what she’d just observed that the decade or more of trauma that he couldn’t remember came to torment him while he slept. Hating that she had to leave, hating that there was nothing she could do to help him right now, Kate turned and headed back to the center of the Cave, heading out of it for the third time that night. On her way, she switched off the lights that Luke had left on but dimmed, plunging it into darkness, before finally stepping into the elevator and heading for home and her bed to get some much needed rest.


	8. Enter Oracle

“Any luck getting a hold of Felicity?” Kate asked, striding into the Cave first thing the next morning with the leather journal she’d managed to find for Oliver in hand to find Luke at his computers, frowning the way he did when facing a particularly vexing puzzle. He shook his head.

“The only phone number I could find listed anywhere was her company’s, not hers,” he said. “I called it, and they transferred me to her direct line, but when she answered, I couldn’t think of what to say, and we never actually established what pretense to use to get her to come to Gotham, so I panicked and hung up.” Kate sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose while she mulled that over. It was certainly an understandable reaction, though it did complicate things.

“Well, can you hack into her computer system and get a message to her that way somehow?” she asked. She kept her voice low, mindful of waking Oliver, who was most likely still sleeping.

“I’ve been trying,” Luke replied, which explained what he’d been doing when Kate had walked in, “but her firewalls are  _ insane. _ Honestly, they’re like Oracle level good. I can’t tell if she’s pragmatic or paranoid.”

“Considering what she’s been through, it’s honestly probably a bit of both,” Kate said. After a moment, something occurred to her, and she asked “Wait, you said her firewalls were Oracle level?”

“Yeah,” Luke replied. “Why?”

“No reason,” Kate said. “It’s just that I think I know just who to call for help with this.”

Two minutes later, she was on the phone, calling Barbara Gordon.

“Look, Barbara, I know we were never really friends, but I need your help,” she said the moment Barbara picked up. “I need to get a hold of Felicity Smoak, but her contact information’s not listed anywhere that we could find, and Luke’s not able to get through her firewalls-”

“What do you need to contact Felicity for?” Barbara interjected. She sounded tense and irritated. Kate noted her use of only Felicity’s first name, but thought nothing of it.

“Do you still have access to the Cave?” she asked instead of answering Barbara’s question. 

“I don’t think Bruce ever rescinded mine,” Barbara replied. “Why?”

“Because this is all really better explained in person,” Kate said. There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment before Barbara said, “Give me five minutes” and hung up.

“What the hell, Kate?” Barbara demanded sharply the moment the elevator doors slid open and she wheeled herself forward into the Cave, just about exactly five minutes later. “This is the sort of bullshit I would have expected from Bruce, but from  _ you _ ?! Felicity’s still mourning the love of her life and you want to drag her into whatever nonsense you’ve got going on down here?! She has children to take care of, for God’s sake!”

“Barbara, relax,” Kate said, deciding to deal with the fact that Barbara apparently knew Felicity personally later. “I have no intention of getting Felicity involved in my ‘nonsense’”

“Then why do you need to get a hold of her so badly?” Barbara asked.

“Because her husband is alive,” Kate replied. “And I thought that she had a right to know.”

“He’s alive?” Barbara asked incredulously. “ _ How _ ?” 

“I don’t know,” Kate replied with a shrug. “But I found him in the lobby of Wayne Tower two days ago, and he… he doesn’t know who he is. The only thing he remembers is Felicity’s name. I’m still trying to work out how to address  _ that _ particular issue.”

“You realize that even if you tell her, there’s no way she’ll believe you, right?” Barbara asked, apparently deciding, at least for the moment, to skim over what Kate had just said. “Not without proof. I mean, I’m not even sure that  _ I  _ believe you.”

“Well then,” Kate replied, gesturing toward the back of the Cave. “See for yourself.” Barbara raised an eyebrow at that, skepticism alight in her green eyes, before turning her chair around and wheeling herself off in that direction. For several long moments, there was silence, and then, from where she stood with Luke, Kate heard a loud crash, followed by Barbara’s cry of pain.

_ Oh no, _ she thought, a chill of fear spreading through her, and she ran for the back of the Cave as fast as her feet could carry her. She bolted around the corner and clattered to a halt at the tableau that awaited her there- Barbara’s wheelchair, lying on its side on the floor, and Oliver, pinning Barbara against the wall by her neck. Kate realized very quickly what must have happened; Oliver must have woken from a nightmare, seen Barbara looking over him, and, still in the throes of his dream, perceived her as an attacker and lashed out in defense against her.

“Oliver!” Kate cried, running over to him and grabbing him by the shoulder, pulling him forcibly backwards away from Barbara, who dropped to the floor, gasping and coughing as air rushed back into her lungs. “Oliver, it’s alright! She’s a friend!”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Oliver mumbled frantically as awareness dawned in his eyes, scrambling backwards onto the bed and pulling his limbs tight against his body, some unnamed instinct prompting him to make himself look as small as possible so as to present as less of a threat.

“It’s alright,” Barbara replied in a strained voice. “I know you didn’t mean it.” Silence fell as she manuvered herself into a more upright position. The only sound was that of Oliver’s rapid, ragged breathing, echoing loudly in the cramped space of the living area. Kate glanced over at him, concerned, and saw that while he’d allowed his posture to loosen a bit, the pattern of his breathing was still frantic and panicked, his chest heaving, a wild look in his bright blue eyes. Kate chanced stepping close to him and laying a hand on his arm, and he stilled at her touch, if only a little. With that, she turned to Barbara and glanced between her and her wheelchair, silently asking if she needed her to help her back into it. Barbara shook her head, and conveyed through gestures- it felt wrong to disturb the silence, somehow- that she just needed Kate to right it and move it next to her, at which point she’d be able to get back into it on her own. Kate did so, and waited, not speaking, all too aware of the tension that hung in the air.

“Well,” she risked saying once Barbara had gotten herself settled, trying to dispel it. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”


	9. Insights

“Let’s try that again, shall we?” Kate asked, obviously trying to dispel the tension that hung over them all. “Oliver, this is Barbara Gordon. And Barbara, I’m pretty sure you already know Oliver.”

“I know  _ of _ him, yes,” Barbara agreed. Oliver took a moment to study her, sizing her up in the way that he no longer questioned when he felt compelled toward it. Behind her wire framed glasses, her green eyes had a fierce gleam in them that matched her fiery red hair, and though she was in a wheelchair, which would have caused people to perceive her as weak or helpless, Oliver got the distinct impression that she was anything but.

Barbara locked eyes with him suddenly, seeming to have noticed him staring.

“I remember Felicity contacting me desperate for help finding the person who did that to you,” she said softly, idly, gesturing toward the circular burn scar on the left side of his chest. “I’d never seen her so angry and violent. Imagine, loving someone that much.” The moment those words were out of her mouth, Oliver saw Kate wince, and Barbara immediately buried her head in her hands. Apparently, she’d just said something she shouldn’t have.

“Felicity… loves me?” Oliver asked, shocked. He was silent for a while while he processed that information. Then he glanced down at his wedding ring and a realization dawned on him.

“She’s the person I’m married to, isn’t she?” he asked. “She’s my wife.”

“Well, I’m glad we’ve got  _ that _ settled,” Kate said, affecting a lightness to her tone that Oliver could very easily tell was forced.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his tone sharper than he meant for it to be, turning the question into a demand. 

“We didn’t know  _ how _ ,” Kate answered. “Or if we even  _ should _ . You remember what Luke told you- we wanted to avoid causing you any kind of undue mental distress, so we just thought that it would be better for information like that to come to you as it will.”

“I suppose I can’t argue with that,” Oliver mumbled.

“That was the right move,” Barbara put in, addressing him. “Without knowing anything about your condition, and specifically its cause, Kate and Luke had no way of knowing what might aggravate it or otherwise cause you distress. So they did the right thing, under the circumstances.”

“Right, I understand,” Oliver said, because he did. “You don’t need to defend them to me.”

“Sorry,” Barbara replied, sheepish, her eyes downcast. “It just felt like I needed to for some reason.” Oliver nodded in understanding, and silence fell over the group once more. 

“Oh!” Kate exclaimed after a moment, as if something had suddenly occurred to her. “Here.” She handed him a green leather journal secured with a tie, a pen in the same color tucked underneath said tie, and added, “I found this for you before I came here.”

“Thank you,” Oliver mumbled, taking the journal from her.

“You’re welcome,” she replied. There was a pause, then she asked “Are you going to be okay back here? Barbara and I need to go and discuss our next move. 

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “I could use some breakfast, though.”

“Of course,” Kate agreed. “I’ll see if Luke doesn’t mind bringing you something.”

“Thank you,” Oliver said. Turning to Barbara, he added, “Sorry again for attacking you.” and she replied “Don’t worry about it” at the exact same time that Kate told him “You’re welcome.” He shook his head to clear it of the disorientation that made him feel, and then he watched Kate and Barbara disappear around the corner.

As soon as they’d gone, Oliver dressed himself in the clothes from the chest, surprised to find out that Kate had, in fact, gotten his size right, then sat down on the bed, slipped the pen out from under the tie on the journal Kate had given him and undid it, easing the journal open and hearing the strangely familiar crack of the binding as he pushed the cover flat. Then he paused for a moment to collect his thoughts before he before he began to write down everything that he had learned about himself in the last two days, all the pieces of memories that had come back to him- his name was Oliver- although, he realized as he put that information down, he didn’t know his last name- Felicity was his wife, and she had a friend named Curtis who was like Luke in some way or another, at least enough for the latter to remind him of the former. The flash he’d had of a giant neon-lit Q when he’d first set eyes on Wayne Tower he made a note of as well, with a question mark next to it so he’d remember that it needed further investigation.

When he’d finished, he looked over the list and felt his heart sink. It was a short list, depressingly so. It was clear to him now that the road to getting his memories, himself, his  _ life _ back would be a long and difficult one. There was one bright spot in it all, though- as he’d once heard Luke remind Kate, sound carried in the cavern, and because of that he had heard enough snatches of Barbara and Kate’s conversation as they discussed their next move to know that they planned to get in contact with Felicity and get her to come to Gotham somehow. Maybe she would be able to tell him who he was. Or better yet, maybe the sight of her would be the trigger that his lost memories needed to start coming back on their own. 

After a while, the sound of approaching footsteps pulled Oliver from his musings. He set the journal aside and his list aside just in time for Luke to appear around the corner, presumably with the breakfast Kate had said she would ask him to bring, and as he approached, Oliver readied himself to face whatever the rest of the day would bring, find himself both looking forward to and dreading finding out what that would be.


	10. Travel Plans

Felicity was awakened early in the morning by her phone ringing. She came to full awareness slowly, wishing to delay what she knew was coming next. As time had passed since the Crisis, she had recovered enough from her grief over Oliver’s death that the weight of it no longer crushed her beneath it, but the pain of his absence was a constant ache in her chest, and it left her only when she slept. Now that she was awake, it returned, as constant and as painful as ever.

“Hello?” she asked, grabbing her phone from where it sat on top of her nightstand and lifting it to her ear. 

“Felicity, it’s Barbara,” Barbara Gordon said on the other end of the line, and Felicity felt her face fold into a puzzled frown. She hadn’t spoken to Barbara in ages, not since she’d contacted her for help finding Adrian Chase, what seemed like centuries ago now. 

“We haven’t spoken to each other in ages,” she said, voicing her thoughts. “What prompted you to call  _ now _ ?”

“I know we haven’t talked in awhile, but we’re still friends, right?” Barbara replied, answering the question with one of her own.

“Right,” Felicity agreed.

“Right,” Barbara said. “Well,  _ as _ your friend, I’m calling to tell you that you need to come to Gotham. Immediately.”

“What?” Felicity asked. “Why?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Barbara said evasively.

“Well, then I can’t go,” Felicity replied. “I have a  _ life _ , Barbara. I have responsibilities. I can’t just drop everything and take a trip to Gotham. Not without a reason.”

“If I told you the reason, you wouldn’t believe me,” Barbara said. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this one, Felicity.”

“But there  _ is _ a reason,” Felicity prompted. Barbara sighed.

“Yes,” she said. “There  _ is _ a reason.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what it is, and I’ll decide for myself whether or not I believe it?” Felicity asked.

“Alright,” Barbara said reluctantly. After a pause, she went on, “Oliver is alive, Felicity. He’s alive, and he’s here in Gotham.”

“No,” Felicity said. “Don’t you dare give me false hope like that, Barbara. You know as well as I do that that’s impossible.”

“Just yesterday I would have agreed with you,” Barbara replied, “but I  _ saw _ him, Felicity. I spoke to him. Hell, he tried to crush my windpipe not even an hour ago.”

“Oliver would never do that,” Felicity said, hearing the anger in her voice and not caring. If this was all just some kind of elaborate prank, Barbara wasn’t doing a very good job of making it believable by telling her that Oliver had acted in a way that she knew in her heart of hearts he never would.

“Not consciously, no,” Barbara said, distracting Felicity from her thoughts. “But that’s the thing- I don’t think he  _ was  _ conscious. I think he woke up from a nightmare, saw me looking over him, and attacked me in self defense before he was awake enough to realize that I wasn’t a threat.”

“But when he  _ did _ realize it, he let you go?” Felicity asked, holding her breath while she waited for the answer, hardly daring to hope that it would be what she wanted it to be.

“Yes,” Barbara said, and Felicity released her pent-up breath in a rush of air. She knew now that Barbara was telling the truth; she had witnessed firsthand the phenomenon that her friend had described, but she had never told anyone about it, because it wasn’t anyone’s business. For Barbara to know about it, she would have had to have witnessed it firsthand herself. Which meant that Oliver really  _ was _ alive.

“Alright,” she said, feeling the ache in her chest easing at that thought.

“Alright?” Barbara asked. 

“Alright, I’ll come to Gotham,” Felicity explained. “As soon as I can.”

“One last thing, before you do,” Barbara said, “I would leave your children at home with their grandmother.”

“Why?” Felicity asked, frowning. “You don’t think Oliver will want to see them?”

“I’m sure under normal circumstances he would,” Barbara replied. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

“What do you mean?” Felicity asked, suspecting that this wouldn’t be the only time she would ask that question in the near future.

“I  _ really _ wanted to have this conversation in person, once you got here, not over the phone,” Barbara said, “but… Oliver’s lost his memory somehow. Kate told me that when he wandered into Wayne Tower the day before yesterday, he didn’t even know his own name. The only thing he  _ does _ remember is your name. By now, he’s figured out that you're his wife, but that’s all.”

“And until you know more about his condition and its cause, you don’t want to overwhelm him with too much new information at once,” Felicity finished for her.

“Exactly,” Barbara agreed. Felicity sighed. 

“Alright,” she said, feeling a sudden weariness overwhelm her for a moment. “I’ll have to talk to Moira before I leave, then.” She was about to end the call when something occurred to her.

“Wait, should I tell her what’s going on?” she asked.

“You can if you want,” Barbara replied. “But I don’t know if she’ll believe you. I mean,  _ you _ didn’t. Not at first.”

“Good point,” Felicity conceded. “But it’s a risk I’ll have to take. Thank you, Barbara. For telling me about Oliver.” 

“Don’t mention it,” Barbara replied, her words punctuated by a  _ click _ as she ended the call. That done, Felicity took a deep, steadying breath and went to find her mother in law.

She found her right where she’d expected to- in the small sitting room where the Queens had constructed their family memorial to Oliver. She’d spent a lot of time there since the funeral. Felicity had long since lost track of how much time she herself had spent in this room, whiling away the hours with work because doing it while seated before the memorial eased the ache of Oliver’s absence, if only for a little while.

“Moira,” Felicity murmured, entering the room and touching her gently on the shoulder. She flinched and tore her gaze away from the photograph of Oliver and his father that she’d been staring at.

“Oh, Felicity, you startled me,” she said, almost breathlessly, reaching up to fidget with the necklace she wore- the ring she’d worn during the course of her first marriage, strung on a silver chain.

“I’m sorry,” Felicity replied. “I just need to talk to you.”

“About what?” Moira asked, turning to face her fully.

“I just…” Felicity said, trailing off, finding herself at a loss for words. Moira nodded in a silent  _ Go on _ gesture.

“I came to ask if you can watch William and Mia for a little while,” Felicity went on, finding her words again. “I have to take a trip to Gotham, and I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Of course we can,” Moira replied, gently reminding Felicity that her sisters in law were around to help as well. “May I ask the reason for your trip?”

“Um, well, Barbara called,” Felicity said, hoping that she’d told Moira about Barbara at some point in the past, “and apparently Oliver is alive, and he’s in Gotham.” She saw a spark of hope alight in Moira’s eyes. It was clear that she’d never thought that the universe might grant her the miracle of getting her son back after she’d thought she’d lost him more than once, but she was more than willing to believe that it might be possible.

“But he’s lost his memory somehow,” Felicity continued on before Moira could say anything. “Which is why I have to leave William and Mia at home.” Moira nodded.

“Of course,” she said. “Go. We’ll be here waiting for your return.” She gestured toward the door.

“And Felicity?” she called out when Felicity reached it. She turned and looked back at her.

“Good luck,” she said, offering her a hopeful smile. Felicity nodded and continued on her way, praying that whatever awaited her in Gotham wouldn’t destroy that hope.


	11. Reunion

One of the advantages of having married into the Queen family was that Felicity now had access to a private jet- within an hour of her conversation with Moira, she was seated in a plush leather airline seat, fidgeting nervously as the plane taxied down the runway. In her lap sat the family photo album that Moira had pressed into her hands on her way out the door to head to the airport, stating that maybe it might help Oliver’s lost memories return to him. Felicity held onto it like a lifeline as the plane finally began its assent, clenching her fingers around the edge of its heavy bound leather cover.

She spent the entirety of the four hour flight to Gotham running through what ifs and worst case scenarios in her mind, a hard, tight knot of anxiety forming in her chest, just below her sternum. What if Barbara was wrong? What if she  _ thought _ she was telling the truth, that Oliver was alive, but it turned out to be some shapeshifter or doppelganger merely impersonating their Oliver? Crazier things than that had happened. 

Worse than that, what if it  _ was _ their Oliver,  _ her _ Oliver, but he didn’t recognize her, even though he apparently knew her name and knew that she was his wife? What if the sight of her permanently broke or damaged something in his psyche? What if?

Felicity’s slightly panicked internal monologue was cut short by the jolt of the plane landing on the runway in Gotham.

“Mrs. Queen?” the pilot asked from the cockpit as she was about to disembark, still holding tightly to the photo album. Felicity felt an unexpected pang at the name- the only people who ever addressed her that way were employees of the Queen family. She paused and directed her attention toward the pilot.

“Should we find a hotel?” he asked. Felicity understood what he was really asking- did she want him and the crew to wait for her? She shook her head.

“I don’t know how long this trip will last,” she said honestly. “No sense in making you all wait around for me in the meantime.” The pilot nodded and wished her a pleasant time in Gotham by way of a goodbye as she continued on her way off the plane.

_ I don’t know how pleasant it can possibly be _ , she thought as she headed indoors to fetch her bags.  _ The situation being what it is, and Gotham being Gotham. _

By the time she had texted Barbara to let her know that she’d landed and was in a taxi on her way to meet her at Wayne Tower, Felicity had forced herself to put such unpleasant thoughts aside. The situation was far from ideal, of course, but she had more important things to worry about, and as the taxi pulled up to the curb outside her destination, she managed to clear her mind of the constant litany of worried thoughts that had been running through it for the last four hours, but the the hard knot of tension and anxiety in her chest still hadn’t loosened or gone away. She grabbed her bags out of the trunk of the taxi and did her best to ignore it as she hurried inside.

Barbara was waiting for her in the lobby when she entered the building.

“I didn’t mean for you to come straight here from the airport,” she said when she saw her. “I figured you’d go to your hotel and drop your bags off and get settled a little first.” Felicity shook her head.

“I didn’t want to wait,” she said, voice trembling, setting her bags down on the floor and leaning down to give Barbara a hug in greeting. She nodded in understanding, her expression grim and full of sympathy.

“Alright then,” she said when Felicity pulled away from her. “Follow me.” She turned herself around and led Felicity toward the bank of elevators next to the staircase.

“Leave your bags,” she said over her shoulder when Felicity moved to grab them. “We can come back and get them later.” Felicity nodded, but grabbed the photo album from where it was resting on top of them before following Barbara into the nearest elevator.

“It took some convincing to get Kate to let you have access to the Cave,” she told her as it carried them upwards. “She wanted to have us all meet in the lobby, or somewhere outside the building altogether, until I pointed out that if Oliver trusted you with his secrets, she could too.”

“What secrets?” Felicity asked, curious.

“You’ll see,” Barbara replied cryptically. By now, they had reached the penthouse office, what Felicity assumed was their destination- that is, until Barbara led her toward a shelf against the wall and pulled some hidden lever somewhere to reveal the doors to an elevator behind the shelf.

“I know, it’s a bit weird to come all the way up here just to go down to the Cave,” Barbara said as she wheeled herself forward into this second elevator, Felicity just behind her, keeping at a respectful distance so as to give her plenty of room to manuver, “but it would have been too much of a security risk to have Cave access in the main lobby elevators.” Felicity nodded, deep in thought. She recalled that Oliver had worked with Batwoman when he’d been in Gotham with Barry and Kara, though he hadn’t known her identity. And moments ago, Barbara had mentioned Kate’s secrets, and how Felicity could be trusted with them because Oliver had trusted her with his. The only way she could think of that those two things might relate was that Kate’s secrets were similar in nature to the ones she’d spent six years keeping for Oliver. Therefore, Felicity could draw only one conclusion- Kate Kane was Batwoman.

As intriguing as that realization was, though, it had nothing at all to do with the reason why she was here, and by the time the elevator came to a halt and the doors slid open to reveal a massive, sprawling underground cavern- presumably what Barbara had kept referring to as “the Cave”- she had put it from her mind.

“Huh,” Barbara said, moving forward into the cavern, Felicity just behind her, and finding the lights on and the computer monitors nearby running their screensavers but nobody around. “That’s interesting. There’s nobody here.” A pause, then she added, “Kate and Luke must have figured that you’d need some space.” Felicity didn’t know who Luke was, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t  _ care _ , in that moment, because she swore she could feel something pulling at her like a lodestone, drawing her like iron filings to a magnet. Oliver was close. She could feel it.

“Well, anyway, follow me,” Barbara said after a moment, and headed off down a sort of path along the near wall of the cavern. Felicity did as she said, nerves fluttering in her stomach like so many trapped butterflies. After a while, they came to a spot where the wall of the cavern jutted outward, creating a natural alcove beyond it.

_ Wait here, _ Barbara mouthed, and continued on alone.

“Oliver?” Felicity heard her say, and she felt her pulse start to race, heard her heartbeat pounding in her ears. “There’s someone here to see you.” Felicity took that as her cue and stepped out around the spot where the cavern wall jutted outwards, then around the wooden screen that was stretched across the opening of the alcove beyond it, and froze, dropping the photo album she was carrying, letting it fall from suddenly nerveless fingers. 

There, seated on a narrow camp bed, dressed in jeans and a dark grey sweater, was Oliver, real and breathing and  _ alive _ . She took a step forward, and then another, the sound of her footsteps against the floor of the cavern ringing like thunderclaps in her ears, drinking in the sight of him- the planes of his face, the slopes of his shoulders, his hands, large and strong but also surprisingly gentle, hands that had taken countless lives but that had also held their daughter like she was the most precious thing in the world, his bright blue eyes as they stared into hers, a dim spark of recognition lighting in their ocean like depths- every inch of him that she’d thought she’d never get to see again.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, voice wavering in spite of her efforts to keep it steady, coming to a halt a few inches away from the bed on which Oliver sat.

“You’re Felicity,” Oliver said in his familiar soft baritone. “You’re my wife.” Felicity nodded, words failing her. Barbara, who’d been waiting off to the side, reached out and gave Felicity a gentle nudge forward, and she finally traversed the last few inches of space that remained between her and her husband, coming to sit beside him on the bed. She reached out hesitantly and took his hand in hers, and found herself having to choke back a sob when she felt the scrape of the calluses on his fingertips and upper palm against her skin.

There was a moment of stillness between them, of tension, and then Oliver wrapped his arm around Felicity and pulled her close to him, tucking her against his side, a gesture performed with such ease that it seemed instinctual, something his body remembered even if his conscious mind remembered only her name and the shallowest, most simplistic description of her relationship to him. Felicity rested her head against his chest, listening to the rhythmic thump of his heartbeat and breathing in his familiar scent of leather and pine and smoke and hot metal, laced now with something else, something new- ozone. The scent of the air before a storm. Her shoulders shook with sobs, tears of joy and pain and relief streaming down her face. She knew that they had a long, hard road ahead of them, but for now all she could do- all she  _ wanted _ to do- was revel in the fact that somehow, against all the odds, she had Oliver back.


	12. A Different Perspective

For several long moments, nobody moved. Barbara watched as Felicity cried with her head on Oliver’s chest and Oliver held her, seeming bewildered but also unwilling to let go of her or pull away, feeling like a voyeur but unable to tear her eyes away from the tableau. There was something oddly captivating about a man with no memory compelled to hold the woman he loved in his arms while she let herself fall apart, possessing no knowledge of  _ why _ he felt compelled to do it but nevertheless not fighting it or even questioning it. Barbara allowed herself one brief, fleeting moment to wonder bitterly if something like that could have ever happened between her and Dick if they’d ever ended up in the same situation. Only a moment, though, because ultimately it didn’t matter- whatever she’d once had with Dick was a long way in the past- and then she pushed such musings aside and began searching for a distraction from the tableau before her.

Spotting the heavy bound leather book that Felicity had been carrying, the one she had dropped the second she saw Oliver, lying spine up where it had landed, Barbara moved herself toward it. She reached down to grab it and found that it was just barely out of her reach. If only her arms were just an inch or two longer. Then she would have been able to grab it no problem.

With a frustrated sigh, Barbara leaned over her wheelchair’s armrest, trying to give herself just a little bit of extra reach. She really didn’t want to have to ask Felicity or Oliver for help with this if she could help it. She didn’t want to interrupt their moment. 

It took her leaning so far over that her chair ended up being precariously balanced on the edge of one wheel, but eventually she managed to grab the book off of the cavern floor. The  _ crash _ that she inadvertently made with her chair when she righted it echoed like a gunshot off the walls of the Cave, making Oliver and Felicity jerk suddenly apart, startled.

“Sorry,” Barbara said when they both turned their attention toward her, grinning sheepishly. Felicity spotted the book that was now sitting in her lap and held a hand out for it in a polite yet oddly insistent gesture. 

“Thank you,” she murmured when Barbara crossed to the bed and handed it to her. By now, she and Oliver had moved close to one another on the bed once again, hands to themselves and keeping to their own space this time but nevertheless side by side, pressed against one another, shoulders and hips and legs all touching. Oliver watched the exchange of the book between Barbara and Felicity with interest, his pointed gaze sharp as an arrowhead.

“What’s that?” he asked, directing the question toward Felicity.

“It’s a photo album,” Felicity answered, turning her head to lock eyes with her husband as she settled the object in question in her lap. “A family photo album, to be exact. Your mother gave it to me. She thought it might help bring your memories back.” She opened the photo album as if to begin flipping through it, and Barbara took that as her cue to leave, to take a hint from Kate and Luke and give them some space. She turned and moved out of the alcove, and didn’t  _ stop _ moving until she was back in the center of the Cave. There, she found herself in front of Luke’s computers, thinking about the old days. The Batfamily- Barbara had always thought it was funny that they called themselves that, as if they were some old Mafia family like the Bertinellis or the Falcones- had fallen apart after Bruce disappeared, and there were days, moments, like now, that Barbara missed being Oracle. She missed the thrill of it, the satisfaction she felt knowing that she had found a way to still be useful, a way to continue helping her team after circumstances had made it so that being Batgirl was no longer possible for her.

Idly, Barbara wondered if Felicity ever missed her days as Overwatch. Her situation was different than Barbara’s, the decision to retire her crimefighting identity hers to make and made freely, but Barbara still wondered if she missed it nonetheless. When this was all over, she thought, perhaps she would ask about it.

As she sat, deep in thought, she could just barely hear muttered voices coming from the alcove at the back of the Cave. They were too quiet for her to be able to make out what they were saying, even with the tendency of sound to carry in the Cave, but she could pick out Felicity’s voice, and then Oliver’s, occasionally responding. From the sound of it, Felicity was doing most of the talking. Barbara wondered if she was going through the photo album with him, explaining who the people in the photographs contained within it were. She wondered if that was advisable, considering how many times Kate had warned them of the potential risks of telling Oliver too much about his life before they knew more about his condition. In the end, though, Barbara decided that they just had to hope and trust that Felicity knew how best to help her husband.

The sound of the elevator doors opening pulled Barbara from her musings. She turned to see Kate and Luke, returning to the Cave at last. She moved to intercept them, stopping directly in Kate’s path and forcing her and Luke, who was following close behind her, to come to an abrupt halt. 

“I think Felicity and Oliver still need some space,” she said, a gentle but insistent warning in her voice, jerking her head toward the back of the Cave, where the voices of the people in question could still faintly be heard. 

“Okay, so then what now?” Kate asked, glancing first toward the back of the Cave, then over her shoulder at the elevator at her back. “Do we just turn right back around and leave again?”

“Or stay here,” Barbara replied, gesturing at the workstation around them. “But I get the feeling that they’re working through a lot right now, and they don’t need us interrupting them.” Kate nodded in acceptance of this, and then she and Luke moved to find seats in the workstation and settled in to wait.


	13. Memories

“Wait,” Oliver said when a photograph in the photo album caught his eye, reaching out and laying a hand over Felicity’s to stop her flipping through it. Try though he might, he couldn’t help but notice her sharp intake of breath at his touch.

“What is it?” she asked, turning her head to lock eyes with him. “What did you see?” In answer, Oliver pointed to a photograph in the upper left corner of the page that Felicity had landed on. In it, the two of them were captured standing side by side, Felicity dressed in a floor length strapless gown in a soft cream color, embellished with silver beading and white lace, himself in a comparatively simple black tux, a white flower pinned to the lapel of his jacket that matched the bouquet of them that Felicity was holding.

“That’s us-” she started to say

“On our wedding day,” Oliver interjected.

“You remember,” Felicity said, almost breathlessly, the barest hint of a smile crossing her face.

“The memory came back to me, just now, when I saw that picture,” Oliver replied, nodding toward it. “Except… it’s wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” Felicity asked, frowning.

“Our wedding didn’t happen like that,” Oliver explained. “It wasn’t planned, for one thing. I remember we were outside, in a park, and there was another couple with us. They were the ones who were going to get married, just them, with us as the best man and the maid of honor, but then… you spoke up, and then it became all four of us, getting married together.” He took a moment to recollect the details of this new memory, then added, “There was another person there too, I think, besides us and the other couple.”

“Do you remember the names of any of the other people?” Felicity asked. She looked troubled, though Oliver wasn’t sure why, as the reason didn’t seem to have anything to do with his current amnesia problem.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “but I think I might be able to point them out in a photograph, if you have one.” Felicity nodded and flipped through the pages of the photo album for a moment before coming to a stop once more.

“Here,” she said, tapping a forefinger against a photograph on the page she had stopped on. “Here’s one of the whole wedding party from that day. There’s you and me, obviously, and there’s Dig-”

“Oh, Dig,” Oliver interrupted, remembering him suddenly, at least in that context. “He was our minister, right?” 

“No,” Felicity replied. “He was your best man. And Iris, and Barry”- she pointed out the people in question in the photograph- “they-”

“Were the other couple,” Oliver said, interrupting her once again. “The one that got married with us.” Felicity shook her head.

“Iris was my maid of honor,” she said. “And Barry was a groomsman.” There was a long, tense silence, and Felicity dropped her head into her hands, apparently trying to recollect her thoughts. After a moment, she lifted her head, and when she did, there were tears glimmering in her eyes and tear tracks on her cheeks.

“I upset you,” Oliver murmured, reaching out unthinkingly to brush her tears away. “I’m sorry.” Leaning back away from his touch for the first time since she’d arrived here, Felicity replied, “You didn’t upset me. It’s just… you always used to say that our wedding day was the best day of your life, and for you to not remember it, and then, when the memory of it  _ does _ finally come back to you, for you to remember it completely differently than how it happened… I just don’t understand how we can have two different memories of the same event-” She cut herself off midsentence with a startled gasp, and after a moment Oliver heard her mumble, “Oh. Oh God. Oh no.”

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“The reason why we remember two different versions of the same even is because there’s two different timelines,” Felicity explained. When Oliver frowned, not understanding, she elaborated, “Six months ago, there was an...event, called the Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the entire universe was destroyed, wiped out by an anitmatter wave. Then it was rebooted, creating an entirely new timeline, but for some reason, your memories seem to be of the old one.” 

“Okay,” Oliver said hesitantly, still not sure that he understood. “Do you know why that might be?” Felicity shrugged helplessly.

“I wish I did,” she said. “But since we don’t know what  _ actually _ happened to you when we all thought you died, where you went, or where you’ve been for the last six months, there’s really not any way to figure that out. It might be that the only solution is to wait for your memories to come back and hope that somewhere in them lies the answers we need.”

“It seems like the solution to everything so far is ‘wait for my memories to come back’,” Oliver replied with a sigh.

“I know,” Felicity murmured, lacing her fingers through his and giving his hand a reassuring squeeze. “And I’m sorry. I know how frustrating this must be for you.” Oliver huffed out a humorless laugh in response. 

“But there’s just so many risks involved with this,” Felicity went on. “There are so many unknowns, and even the slightest misstep could cause irreparable damage.” 

“I know,” Oliver muttered, hating the bitterness in his voice. “Luke told me.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could tell you everything,” Felicity said. “About you and me and our lives, all the time we’ve spent together.” Her voice wavered, and she took a moment to compose herself before continuing, “But I don’t know if that would bring your memories of it all back, or if all you would remember would be me telling you about it, like it’s a story that happened to someone else.” Oliver nodded, finally feeling at least a modicum of true clarity of understanding. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I can only imagine how hard this must be for you.”

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Felicity said, her voice turning fierce and fervent. “You didn’t ask for any of this to happen.”

“All I wanted was to be with my family,” Oliver said quietly. He didn’t know where that thought had come from, but he knew, with absolute conviction, that it was true. He had wanted to be with his family, and instead, somehow, he had ended up where he was now. 

As those words left his lips, Felicity’s gaze snapped back to his suddenly. She seemed startled, or perhaps simply shocked.

“Where did that come from?” she asked, voice barely louder than a whisper. 

“I don’t know,” Oliver replied. “But I know that it’s true. I wanted to be with my family, and somehow I ended up here instead.”

“Well, it’s something,” Felicity said. “A possible starting point for figuring this all out, at least.” She was silent for a long moment, then added, “And… I know it’s not much, but I’m here.”

“It’s everything,” Oliver said softly, drawing her into his embrace. “As far as I know, my life started three days ago. You’ve been the only thing I’ve known that whole time, and now you’re here. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

“And maybe someday we’ll all be together again,” Felicity said. “Our whole family, as one.”

“Maybe,” Oliver murmured, and fell silent as he contemplated that seemingly far off day.


	14. Adjustments

The sound of footsteps on the Cave’s stone floor, coming from the back and growing louder as they drew nearer, made Kate, who had been zoning out, waiting to hear about the latest development with Oliver, snap immediately back to full awareness and fix her attention toward the bend in the wall nearby, around which anyone coming toward the center platform from the back of the Cave would have to move eventually. After a moment, Felicity appeared, looking exhausted. As she approached, Kate vacated her chair, and Felicity sank into it with a grateful, weary smile.

“So how’d it go?” Kate finally dared ask after several long moments full of silence.

“Well, Oliver’s memory of our wedding day came back to him,” Felicity replied, the exhaustion evident in her posture and demeanor evident in her voice as well. “But for some reason, his memories seem to be of the original pre-Crisis timeline.”

"Why?" Kate asked. Felicity shook her head. 

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s possible that it has something to do with whatever actually happened to him when we all thought he’d died, or with wherever he’s been for the last six months. But until more of his memories return, there’s no way to be sure.”

“Is there any _good_ news?” Barbara spoke up.

“Oliver remembered that before he ended up in this current situation, what he _wanted_ was to be with his family,” Felicity replied.

“Well, that’s something,” Luke put in. “A starting point, at least.”

“That’s what I told him,” Felicity mumbled, and after that the group fell silent. 

“It’s getting kind of late,” Kate ventured after a while. “Do you need a ride to your hotel?” Felicity shook her head. 

“I never actually booked one,” she said. “I was in such a rush to get here after Barbara called that there wasn’t time. And anyway… I’m not leaving him.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the back of the Cave.

“Oliver?” Kate asked, interpreting the gesture. Felicity nodded. 

“I’ll sleep on the floor if there’s not room for two on the bed,” she said. “But I _can’t_ leave him. Not now. Not when I just got him back.” Kate nodded in understanding.

“Alright,” she said. Turning to Barbara, she said, “Barbara, do you want to go with Felicity back up to the lobby to collect her things?” Barbara nodded, and the two of them headed off. The moment they were gone, Luke turned and fixed Kate with a pointed look.

“I don’t know,” she said in answer to his unspoken question. “I have no idea where we go from here.” Luke shook his head.

“That’s not what I was going to say,” he said.

“Oh,” Kate mumbled in reply. “What _were_ you going to say?”

“Something about how crazy this all is,” Luke said. “I mean, we’re with Oliver for three days, and nothing, and then Felicity’s with him for what, two hours and all of a sudden things start coming back to him? It’s incredible that she can have that much of an effect in so little time.” 

“Well, there’s obviously a reason why the only thing he remembered when he found his way to us was her name,” Kate mused. “She’s important to him, in ways that the rest of us may never truly understand.”

“Hmmm,” Luke mumbled thoughtfully in reply. Kate found herself wondering what that might be like, to love someone so deeply that they became a part of you, that they stayed with you even when you’d forgotten and lost everything else. There’d been a time when she’d thought she’d had that with Sophie, once. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

“I’d better head to the back,” she said abruptly, getting to her feet, attempting to give herself a task with which to distract herself from her dark and gloomy thoughts. “See if there’s anything that needs to be done to make things a little more livable back there.” Luke nodded distractedly, his mind apparently on something else, and Kate headed off.

Oliver was writing in his journal when she came around the corner into the living space, presumably making note of the memories that had come back to him while he’d been with Felicity. He glanced up from what he was doing at the sound of her approach.

“What’s going on?” he asked. Kate shook her head.

“Nothing, really,” she said. “It’s just… Felicity doesn’t want to leave you, so she intends to stay down here in the Cave for the duration of her time in Gotham, which means that I need to figure out what adjustments need to be made to this space to make it a little more livable, because it was really only designed to occupy one person at a time.” Oliver nodded, and watched her as she moved about the space, assessing. 

“We’ll need to bring a mattress back here,” she muttered after a moment, thinking out loud. “That bed’s not big enough for two people. And a folding table and chair couldn’t hurt either, just so you guys have somewhere to sit besides the bed.”

“Maybe another chest, too,” Oliver suggested. “For Felicity’s clothes.”

“So that she doesn’t have to live out of her suitcase the entire time she’s here,” Kate agreed. “Good call.” Oliver shrugged off the compliment and went back to his journaling, setting aside after a moment when he apparently finished with it. Kate got the sense that he didn’t think anything of his awareness of ways to make things easier for Felicity, that it was as natural for him to think of her needs as it was to think of his own. She found herself pondering that as she went about the process of actually making the adjustments to the living space that she’d determined were necessary. 

_When you get right down to it_ , she thought, _it’s just another item in the increasingly long list of ways that Felicity is simply part of him now, a piece of his life that he will carry with him no matter what happens or how circumstances might separate them._

That thought, coupled with Luke’s observation of how quickly Felicity’s presence had brought about a marked improvement in Oliver’s condition, left Kate with the hope- one that she prayed was not about to be dashed by grim reality- that now that Felicity was here, helping Oliver might prove to be just a little easier for all of them from here on out.


	15. A Haunting

_ The world was moving, shifting up and down in time with the rhythm of waves… Oliver was on a boat. There was a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder, and the world tilted, throwing him to the floor. He slammed into it hard enough to drive the air from his lungs, and he’d barely gotten his breath back before the side of the boat disappeared and water came rushing in, dragging him out to sea. A scream, not his own, echoed in his ears, but he couldn’t see where it had come from, and in the next instant all he knew was darkness and cold and water all around him, panic and the briefest crash of thunder before he was pulled beneath the surface and everything went silent. _

_ As he sank further and further down, closer and closer to the bottom of the sea, his lungs burned with the need to take in air, until at last he couldn’t resist it anymore and he took a deep, gasping breath inward only to take in nothing but seawater. _

_ Then he was drowning, his vision starting to go black around the edges as he slowly lost the ability to keep breathing, and the surface was so impossibly far above him- _

Oliver jerked suddenly awake. He was still lying in his bed in the Cave, safe- or relatively so- but in the moments before reality set back in, he felt it moving beneath him, like he was being tossed around on a tempest swept sea, and he couldn’t breathe. He gasped for air, sure that he was still drowning. 

“Oliver?” Felicity’s voice called out in the darkness, laced with concern. It wasn’t totally pitch black in the Cave- there was just enough ambient light for Oliver to be able to see her standing over him a moment later, if not make out the concerned expression he was sure must have been on her face. “What’s wrong?”

Instead of answering, Oliver pulled her down toward him and kissed her deeply, kissed her like she was his source of oxygen, kissed her until he felt like he could breathe again. When it was over, they broke apart, but Felicity didn’t pull away. Oliver could feel her breath fanning across his face each time she exhaled.

“Oliver…” she whispered, trailing off. A moment later, they were bathed in light as she switched on the lamp that Kate had placed beside the bed earlier that night. 

“What happened?” she asked, and now Oliver could see the concern written all over her face.

“I had a nightmare,” he told her. “There was a boat, and a storm, and I was drowning…” He trailed off, his breath coming quicker as the memory of it threatened to overtake him. Felicity laid a calming hand on his arm, and he felt his breathing return to normal once more. There was a moment of silence, of stillness, then Felicity let out a sigh, one filled with anguish and empathy.

“Move over,” she told him, climbing into the bed.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t think this bed is big enough for two-”

“We’ll make do,” Felicity interjected gently. “Trust me. I know what you need right now.”

“And that’s this?” Oliver asked, rolling over onto his side and moving as close to the edge of the bed as he could to give Felicity room. She ended up pressed against his side, his right forearm underneath her, her head nestled in the crook of his elbow.

“Yes,” she answered when she’d gotten settled. “Every time this has happened, this has always been what helped you- the two of us lying together side by side.”

“You’re saying I have that nightmare about the boat and the storm and myself drowning a lot?” Oliver asked in a low voice, doing his best to shift himself into a more comfortable position without jostling Felicity too much.

“Not necessarily that one,” Felicity replied. “But you do have nightmares a lot, yes. You’ve… been through a lot of trauma in your life, and it tends to come back and haunt you when you sleep. I’ve never known why, but when I’m with you… your nightmares aren’t as bad. Somehow, in some way, my presence helps you.” Almost immediately, Oliver got a sense of what she meant- as soon as they were finally fully settled in, he felt his eyelids grow heavy, sleep reaching up with gentle yet insistent hands to pull him slowly beneath its depths. The last thing he was aware of before surrendering to it was Felicity reaching over to turn off the lamp, casting them into darkness once more.

When Oliver woke again, hours later, his body was telling him that it was morning. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was that he had lost all feeling in his right arm where Felicity was lying on it. He considered extriacating it from underneath her and trying to get some feeling back into it, but she looked so peaceful, and he didn’t want to wake her. Instead, he was content to lie there and gaze at her sleeping beside him, captivated by her beauty, though he got the sense that her looks were not what he had fallen in love with her for.

As he lay there, patiently waiting for Felicity to wake up, something occurred to Oliver suddenly- excepting the nightmare that had woken him, this had been the first night of full and restful sleep that he had gotten in the three days since he had woken up in that park. It seemed Felicity had been right- having her close had kept the ghosts of his unremembered past from haunting his sleep.

“I never doubted you for a second,” he murmured aloud.

“Hmmm?” Felicity mumbled sleepily, stirring at last, shifting around to face him.

“Nothing,” Oliver said. “I just… thank you. For knowing how to help me.”

“I’m just glad that I was able to,” Felicity replied. “I wasn’t sure that the usual methods would work. You know, given everything.”

“Hmmm,” Oliver mumbled thoughtfully, but had no further commentary to offer. They lay there in silence for a long time, neither of them feeling like moving, until, in the distance, they heard the sound of the elevator.

“Here comes Kate,” Felicity mumbled. After a pause, she amended, “Probably. Whoever it is, we’re going to have to get up and do things in a minute or two.” Oliver let out an exaggerated groan and slumped back against his pillow. As much as he knew that the “things” Felicity referred to were important, and necessary, at the moment all he wanted was to savor the effects of having finally gotten a good night’s sleep. He allowed himself another moment to enjoy it, then extriacated himself from underneath Felicity, shaking his arm to get the feeling back into it and then kissing Felicity quickly before they parted briefly to get ready for the day.

No sooner had they finished doing so then Kate appeared around the corner, hair mussed and bleary eyed, clutching a mug full of still steaming coffee in one hand.

“Apologies for my appearance,” she said, gesturing toward herself with the hand not holding her coffee cup. “I’m not much of a morning person. But I’m glad to see that you two apparently are. We have a lot to do today.”


	16. Plans

“So, I’ve been thinking,” Kare said later that morning, sitting with Oliver and Felicity at Luke’s workstation later that morning to discuss next steps. When they both looked at her curiously, she elaborated, “About ways we might be able to speed the process of Oliver’s memories returning to him along.”

“Not that he hasn’t made some impressive progress already, since you arrived,” Luke put in, addressing Felicity. “But Kate and Barbara and I were discussing it, and we think that anything that might help, we should try.” Oliver and Felicity exchanged a glance, some kind of unspoken communication passing between them.

“That makes sense,” Felicity said, speaking for the both of them. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, see, there’s a slight problem there,” Kate replied, “because I don’t really know how to explain it. I’d have to show you, and remember how I mentioned that I’m not much of a morning person? I haven’t gotten around to making the necessary preparations yet.”

“Well, we’re not going anywhere,” Oliver pointed out. “So, you know. Take your time.” Kate nodded and set to it.

The preparations ended up taking most of the rest of the day, as they required a trip to the Hall to retrieve a couple of the necessary items, but finally, by the time evening rolled around, everything was ready. Kate waited with bated breath while Barbara went to fetch Oliver and Felicity, who were in the living area again, presumably going over the photo album some more, and bring them to where Kate had set up, another out of the way corner of the Cave, of which there were many. 

“Here,” Kate said once Barbara had gone, handing Oliver his bow and quiver. Gesturing toward the target she’d set up against the wall, she added, “Maybe this will help trigger something.”

Oliver took his quiver from her first, looking bewildered, but the moment he’d put his arms through its straps and it had settled into place against his back there came an immediate shift in his posture, as if he were instinctively adjusting for its weight. Then he took his bow from Kate, drew an arrow from his quiver, and fitted it to his bowstring in a smooth, practiced motion that must have startled him with the ease of it, judging from his shocked expression. After a pause, he shook his head vigorously, as if to clear it, drew back his bow, and took aim at the target on the wall. As he was about to loose the arrow he had ready, he hesitated, glancing back over his shoulder at Felicity, who nodded encouragingly. With that, Oliver turned back toward the target and let the arrow fly. It embedded itself in the target a split second later with a quiet but clearly audible  _ thump _ . 

_ There he is, _ Kate thought as she watched him repeat the process with the rest of the arrows in his quiver, watched an eerie calm steal over him as he took aim and fired at the target again and again, that laser focus of his that had become familiar to Kate in the brief time she had spent fighting by his side during the Crisis.

A few minutes later it was over. Oliver’s quiver was empty, the arrows that had been in it now embedded in neat rows in the center two rings of the target. Oliver stumbled backwards, dropping his bow.

“How- how did I do that?” he stammered, gesturing toward the target. “How did I know  _ how _ to do that?” Kate opened her mouth to reply, but no sound came out. She glanced over at Felicity, who also appeared to be at a loss. How did you explain something like that? Where did you even  _ begin _ \- with the fact that he was- or had been- the Green Arrow? Or with the decade or more of trauma that had made him into that person, that had forged him into a hero as a blacksmith forged steel. Kate pondered this while Oliver glanced frantically between her and Felicity, clearly desperate for answers, but she found that none were forthcoming.

“I’m… not sure how to explain it,” she finally admitted. “Or where to begin. I’m sorry.” Oliver nodded in grim acceptance of her words. 

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I can only imagine how complicated this must be.”

“And getting more so by the day,” Kate agreed. She sighed heavily, trying to force the tension from her body, with little success. After a moment, she glanced sideways at Felicity, an idea coming to her suddenly.

“Felicity,” she said aloud. “Can I talk to you for a moment? In private?” Felicity nodded and followed her a short distance away, just far enough to be out of earshot of Oliver. 

“I have to take a brief trip to the Hall-” Kate began.

“So that’s where you got Oliver’s bow and quiver from,” Felicity interjected, sounding more like she was thinking out loud than anything else. “From his memorial in the Hall of Justice.”

“You know about that?” Kate asked.

“Barry told me about it,” Felicity replied. “I’ve never seen it.” 

“You’re right,” Kate said, responding to her earlier statement. “That’s where I got Oliver’s bow and quiver from, and I need to make a trip back there to put them back.”

“And you needed to talk to me about that because?” Felicity asked. 

“I was going to take Oliver with me to the Hall,” Kate replied. “But only if you think that it’s advisable.”

“That depends on your purpose in taking him there,” Felicity said, her mouth set in a grim, hard line. “What you’re hoping will happen.”

“I’m _hoping_ that if he sees his memorial, the answers about who he is, how he was able to do _that_ ”- she gestured toward the target and the cluster of arrows embedded in it- “might come back to him on their own, because I haven’t the slightest idea how to explain it to him.”  
“Seems like all we’ve been doing lately is hoping for miracles,” Felicity muttered. “But I don’t see us having any other option, so alright. If you think it’ll help, take Oliver back to the Hall with you.” 

“If that has the intended effect,” Kate said, “it might be difficult to watch, so I’d understand if you wanted to stay behind.” Felicity shook her head. 

“I told you that I’m not leaving him,” she said, setting her jaw. “I’m coming. There’s nothing and no one in this world that could stop me.”


	17. Remembrance

For the second time in less than a week, Felicity found herself seated in a plush leather airline seat in a private jet as it taxied down a runway. She knew that the Kanes, like their cousins the Waynes, were one of Gotham’s old money families, but Kate didn’t look or act or speak at all like someone from that particular social strata, at least in Felicity’s admittedly limited experience with such people. Aside from her penthouse office in a building that she owned, this jet was the clearest demonstration of wealth that Felicity had yet seen from Kate, but even it was born out of necessity- she had explained before they’d embarked that without the advantage of superspeed or the ability to fly under one’s own power, it would have taken at least a day, if not more, to travel to the Hall from Gotham by any other means.

This time, it was Oliver’s hand that Felicity held onto like a lifeline as the plane began its assent. Or maybe he was the one holding onto her. It was hard to tell. Either way, they didn’t let go of each other until the plane touched down on the landing strip outside the Hall, and even then, the moment they stepped foot on the asphalt outside, Felicity laced her fingers through Oliver’s once more, tethering herself to him as they followed Kate into the Hall.

Kate had warned her that if seeing his memorial had the intended effect on Oliver, it might be difficult to watch, but Felicity knew she could face it if she had Oliver by her side, that she could get through it if she kept holding onto him, maintaining the physical connection that reminded him that she’d been granted the miracle of getting him back from the dead for a third time. She tried to keep that thought at the forefront of her mind as she entered the building, but it was soon overshadowed by her need to take it all in. She still remembered the first time they had all gathered together here, long before any of them had ever met Kate Kane, when the Hall of Justice had been nothing more than an unused STAR Labs facility, the very first time they had found themselves facing a threat too great for any one of them to face alone. It looked much the same now as it had then, excepting the fact that some of its soaring, wide open space was now occupied by Oliver’s memorial and the table where the newly minted Justice League would presumably one day hold their group strategy sessions. Felicity felt a brief but agonizingly painful stab of grief when she saw that each of the chairs around that table were marked with a symbol denoting a particular member of the team, including the green arrow symbol as familiar to her as her own name. She could see them all in her mind’s eye, taking their places around the table and glancing toward the empty chair that would serve as a constant reminder of the place where Oliver should have been.

She was distracted from her musings by Oliver gently tugging on her hand, turning her attention toward where Kate was returning his bow and quiver to their places within his memorial.

“Who was he?” he asked, gesturing toward it with the hand not holding Felicity’s. She hesitated, and she saw Kate do the same, neither of them sure how much they could tell him. There was a long, tense silence, then finally Kate said, “ A hero. He sacrificed himself to remake the universe after it was destroyed in the Crisis.” Oliver nodded and started unblinkingly at it, studying it intently with that familiar laser focus of his. It was strange to see him look at the Green Arrow suit and not recognize it as something he had worn, to hear Kate talk to him about his own life, his own actions, as if they were someone else’s.

_ The man I love- who means more to me than a thousand universes- is dead, and not only do you not tell me, you act like it’s just another Thursday? _ Felicity’s own words came back to her then, suddenly, carried across the long, painful months since the Crisis by her memories of that time. It struck her in that moment, harder than it yet had, that  _ Oliver didn’t know who he was. _ He didn’t know that he was that man, the man she had confronted a cosmic being of unimaginable power for, that she would have killed herself trying to bring back if Barry hadn’t found a different way.

Feeling overwhelmed, Felicity let go of Oliver’s hand and stumbled backwards until she collapsed into the chair marked with his symbol. Bracing her elbows on her knees, she buried her face in her hands and took deep, gasping breaths, trying to stave off the panic attack she could sense was coming. And she’d thought the days were those plauged her were a long way behind her. After a time, she sensed a presence looming over her, either Kate or Oliver, she couldn’t tell without looking, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to look. Better to wait for whoever it was to announce their presence in some way or another. She did so, but was met with nothing but silence. No one spoke. No one even made a sound.

Then, suddenly, someone let out a shocked, startled gasp. Felicity jerked her head upwards at the sound to see Oliver, standing less than an inch away from her, one hand held out as if to lay it on her shoulder, but instead he was standing frozen, stock still, a faraway look in his bright blue eyes as if he were seeing something that no one else could see. 

“It’s me,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper, but carried by the echoey quality of the structure of the building. “Or... I’m him.” He glanced over his shoulder at the memorial, making it clear what he was referring to. “I…I remember. There were these-these…  _ things _ . I’d call them dementors, except I  _ know _ that  _ those _ aren’t real. I was fighting them, a horde of them,  _ hundreds _ of  _ thousands _ of them. I was out of arrows, so I dropped my bow and charged them empty handed, and then…” He trailed off.

“And then?” Felicity risked prompting. Oliver locked eyes with her, looking more fearful than she’d ever thought she’d see him.

“I… I think I died,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Felicity's experience during Crisis, which I referenced in this chapter, was covered in the tie-in comic that DC/the CW released on December 15th of this past year. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It gave us a really interesting window into what was going on with the characters we didn't see on screen during the event.


	18. Tales of Woe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See if you can spot the nod to Kanvers in this chapter ;)

There was a long silence, fraught with tension, then finally Kate chanced speaking up.

“Yes,” she said in response to Oliver’s revelation, waiting for him to turn back around toward his memorial before she stepped into his eyeline. “You did.” She paused for a moment to compose herself, feeling tears prick at her eyes at the reminder, her unresolved PTSD from the Crisis rearing its head, before continuing, “At the start of the Crisis, the antimatter wave came and wiped out countless Earths before anyone was able to detect it. But by the time it neared Earth-38, we had warning that it was coming, and we went there to try and stop it, as well as evacuate as many people offworld as we could in the event that we could not and Earth-38 was destroyed just like all the other Earths before it.”

“Wait,” Felicity cut in. Kate heard her more than she saw her- Oliver was standing in between them, so she caught only glimpses of her where she sat in the chair marked with the Green Arrow symbol. “Assuming the population of Earth-38 at the time was equivalent to that of Earth-1, that’s-”

“Seven billion people,” Kate finished for her. “Exactly. Contrary to what you might expect, the issue was not that we didn’t have the means to accomplish an exodus of that size, it was that we didn’t have _time_ . The antimatter wave was coming too fast, and the man, or being, whatever he was, responsible for the Crisis wanted to make sure that nothing and no one escaped destruction, so he sent minions of his- shadow demons, those dementor looking things from Oliver’s memory, to hinder the evacuation effort. We were able to fight them off at first, but eventually their numbers became too great and we were forced to pull back. But not everyone had made it to safety yet, and Oliver… you refused to leave until everyone was off. The last I saw of you before I was breached offworld with the others was you charging that horde of shadow demons, and the next thing I knew, you were dead.” She took a shaky breath inward, doing her best not to let her trauma overcome her, then went on, “But billions of lives were saved by your sacrifice. Because of you, billions of people made it offworld that otherwise might not have. What I told you is true, Oliver. You _are_ a hero.” Kate decided not to mention the other thing she’d told him, about how he’d sacrificed himself to remake the universe. She figured they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

“I remember dying,” Oliver said. “Or, some of it, anyway. I remember that one of the people from my wedding, Barry, was there during my last moments. And… there was someone else there too, but I can’t quite remember who.”

 _Mia,_ Kate thought but didn’t say. _Your daughter._

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Oliver went on. “If I died, then how am I here now, alive?” Kate shook her head.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” she said. “Whatever chain of events took place to bring you back, I wasn’t present for it.” 

“It was a Lazarus pit,” Felicity spoke up. Her voice wavered, like she either had been crying recently or was trying not to at that precise moment, and Kate leaned around Oliver to look at her. Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears, and tear tracks streaked her cheeks. Kate had been there when she had gone searching for the answers regarding the fate of her husband herself when the Monitor had refused to provide her with them, but it seemed that she had only learned of the event of Oliver’s death, not the circumstances by which it had happened. Evidently those had been hard for her to hear, and Kate sympathized with that, but there was nothing to be done for it now. “Barry put you in a Lazarus pit and brought you back.”

“And what exactly _is_ a Lazarus pit?” Kate dared ask. She vaguely remembered Bruce talking about then once, a long time ago, but as something he read in a book- a myth, a tall tale. Surely they couldn’t be _real_ , right?”

“A Lazarus pit is a pool of water with magical or mystical properties,” Felicity answered. “No one has ever figured out quite how, but it has healing properties so great that it can bring people back from the dead.” Kate considered bringing up the fact that they were supposed to be a myth, that as far as she’d known up to this point, they _were_ a myth, but it seemed that that was not the case. She knew Felicity well enough by now to know that she never believed anything without proof. If she believed that Lazarus pits were real, that meant she must have seen one in action.

“But there’s a consequence to that power,” Felicity continued. “When someone is resurrected in a Lazarus pit, they...they don’t come back the same. Some part of them gets warped and twisted by the process, sometimes in ways so subtle that they can’t be seen until it’s too late; I would never have condoned bringing you back with one if I had known that that’s what Barry was planning. I would have said the risk was too great, but by the time I found out about it, it was too late. The deed was already done, and the fact of the matter is that Barry didn’t have much of a choice. I would have killed myself trying to bring you back if he hadn’t found that other way.”

 _Like Kara_ , Kate thought. _She would have killed herself trying to bring back her Earth and the people she loved if I hadn’t managed to convince her that there was a better way._ The comparison was chilling, and struck her far more deeply than she would have expected.

“That thing you mentioned,” Oliver said, turning to face Felicity, “about Lazarus pits making people warped and twisted, did that- did that happen to me?” Felicity shook her head. 

“I don’t know,” she said, a note of distress slipping into her voice. “I can’t tell. I mean, you _seem_ like the same you you’ve always been, but that might be because of your missing memory, and like I said, sometimes the changes are subtle, and they aren’t always apparent right away, and-”

“Hey,” Oliver interjected soothingly, placing his hands on her shoulders to ground her before she rambled herself into a panic. Kate quickly found anywhere else to look but at them, wanting to give them at least a semblance of privacy.

“It’s alright,” she heard Oliver tell Felicity as soon as she had done so. “We’ll figure it out. Right now we can’t really tell if something’s off with me anyway since so many of my memories are still missing, right?” There was a pause, presumably while Oliver waited for an answering nod from Felicity, then he went on, “So, as they return, keep an eye out, and if something about me seems wrong to you, tell me, and we’ll fix it before it gets any worse, okay?” Another pause, then he said, “Everything will be fine.” After that, there came a long silence, then Oliver asked “Kate?” She turned back toward him to see him seated in the chair that Felicity had been the sole occupant mere moments ago, holding her in his arms in a gentle but still fiercely protective embrace.

“Are we done here?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Kate replied, nodding.

Good," Oliver said. "Then let's go home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it wasn't apparent, I just wanted to assure everyone that my intention here was absolutely not to give Barry all the credit for the plan to use a Lazarus pit to bring Oliver back. The reason why he's the only one that Felicity mentioned in regards to it is because he's the only one that Oliver remembers, and even then only in very specific contexts.


	19. Dreams

It was late by the time they arrived back in Gotham. Oliver could feel weariness dragging at his limbs and dulling his thoughts, but at the same time, he knew he was much too wired to be able to get any appreciable amount of sleep that night, even without the nightmares he was sure would come to visit him the moment he closed his eyes. Nightmares that would have new fuel, he knew, now that he remembered the event of his death.

He was worried for Felicity more than himself, though. From the moment she’d shared the story of his resurrection, she’d had a sort of delicateness about her, as if the slightest push in the wrong direction would make her shatter like glass. Even as vague and nonspecific as the majority of his slowly returning memories still were, Oliver knew that he had never once thought of Felicity as fragile in all the time he’d known her, but fragile was how she looked to him now. It was clear- to him, at least- that current events were hitting her harder than the rest of them, affecting her more than even she’d been prepared for. 

Oliver wanted to talk to her about it, to help her if he could, but an opportunity to do so didn’t present itself until they’d returned to the Cave at last, even later that night than their return to Gotham. Kate and Luke had retired for the night after suggesting that Felicity and Oliver do the same when he saw his chance.

“Felicity,” he murmured, reaching out and catching her by the arm as she was about to go to bed. She turned to face him, a curious expression on her face that didn’t quite hide the shadows he’d seen lurking in her eyes for the last few hours.

“Are you okay?” he asked. Felicity shook her head.

“My husband died in a multiversal apocolypse, was brought back to life, and then as far as anyone knew, sacrificed himself to remake the universe,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself as if to ward off a sudden chill. “And now it turns out he’s alive, but his memories are lost, and without them I have no way of knowing if he’s still the person I remember, the person I fell in love with. Trust me, I don’t plan on using the word ‘okay’ again anytime soon.” Something about the particular turn of phrase in that last sentence sounded familiar, but of course Oliver couldn’t place it. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can see how hard this is on you, and I just… I wish there was something I could do to fix it. To make it better.”

“Well, there isn’t,” Felicity replied, with a tone that would have been snappish if she’d managed to put any sort of force behind her words. “Not unless you can somehow force your memories to return.” Oliver sighed and fixed his gaze on the Cave’s stone floor, unable to meet her eyes when he could do nothing to ease the pain he would see in them. After a moment, Felicity asked, “Oliver, is there some reason why you can’t look at me?”

“I’m sorry,” Oliver replied, forcing himself to lift his eyes to hers. “It’s just… it’s hard to see you in pain because of me, knowing that I can do nothing to fix it.”

“I’m not in pain  _ because _ of you,” Felicity murmured. “I’m hurting  _ for _ you. Because of what’s happened to you. There’s a difference.” There was a long pause, then she said, “But it’s too late to have a proper conversation about this right now. Let’s just go to bed, and we can talk more about it in the morning.” Oliver could see the sense in what she was saying- as much as he doubted whether he’d be able to sleep, he was exhausted, so much so that he doubted he’d be able to carry the kind of difficult, deeply emotional conversation the subject at hand would entail. With that decided, he nodded and followed Felicity to bed. Despite his doubts, sleep came to him the moment he’d gotten settled in bed, and it wasn’t long after that before dreams found him too.

_ “If you’re not going to wear this, then no one should,” the girl, or young woman- she was right on the line between the two that made the distinction hard to pinpoin either way- said, her voice trembling. Oliver realized, suddenly, that she was the other person who’d been there when he’d died, besides Barry. Unfortunately, that told him nothing about who she was. _

_ “Well, it won’t fit me,” he said lightly, trying to put her at ease. He paused, then added, “I figure there should always be at least one Green Arrow.” The young woman looked at him, her eyes glimmering with unshed tears. He knew that the odds were good that he wouldn’t make it out of this, and he wanted her to know that he felt confident in the notion that she would be the one that would carry on his legacy long after he was gone. _

After that, Oliver dreamed no more, and the rest of the night passed him by, dark and silent and empty. He woke first in the morning, a fact that didn’t surprise him in the least. It had happened enough by now that he was starting to accept it as the way of things. He lay there, silent and still, until Felicity woke. 

“Good morning,” she mumbled sleepily, smiling at him.

“Morning,” he replied.

“Any dreams?” Felicity asked after a moment. There was a worried crease between her eyebrows now that Oliver had to resist the urge to smooth out with a kiss. 

“Just one,” he said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the still air. “About the Crisis. Well, I guess it was actually a memory, but in it, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it out of the Crisis alive, and I was passing the mantle of the Green Arrow on to someone who I knew would carry my legacy long after I was gone.” 

“Who?” Felicity asked, her voice hoarse with emotion.

“A young woman,” Oliver replied. “The other person, besides Barry, who was there when I died. But I can’t seem to remember anything about her beyond that.” As he spoke, he felt Felicity tense as she lay beside him.

“Felicity?” he asked, troubled. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Felicity said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Somehow though, Oliver knew that was a lie.


	20. Clarity

The last few days had been filled with difficult situations and impossible questions, but never had Felicity expected to be confronted with one so soon after waking up. The moment Oliver had mentioned the young woman in his dream of the Crisis, she had known exactly who she was. She still remembered how it had felt when she’d seen Mia at Oliver’s funeral, the pain of seeing her own grief reflected in her daughter’s eyes, the pride she’d felt knowing that this young woman, so like her father in a dozen beautiful ways, was the person her baby girl would one day grow up to be. But the problem now, the debate she was having with herself, was whether she should tell Oliver who the young woman in his dream was. Whether she even  _ could _ . She needed to make up her mind quickly, though, because she could tell that Oliver knew she’d been lying when she’d told him that everything was fine.

“We still need to continue our conversation from last night,” she said, coming to a decision, sitting up in bed and switching on the lamp.

“Felicity,” Oliver murmured in response, a warning in his voice. Apparently, the prospect of a much needed discussion that she’d just laid before him hadn’t distracted him from the other issue at hand like she’d hoped it would. “What’s wrong? And don’t say-”

“Nothing,” Felicity interjected.

“Don’t say nothing!” Oliver said. The volume of his voice dropping, he went on, “I can tell that something’s bothering you. Well, something else. Please, just tell me what it is.”

“I can’t,” Felicity said hoarsely, shaking her head.

“Why not?” Oliver asked.

“Becuase it’s something I can’t properly explain until more of your memories come back,” Felicity answered. She wanted to tell him about Mia, she truly did, but she wasn’t prepared to accept the risks involved. Not yet.

“Alright,” Oliver said after a moment. There was a reluctance in his tone, as if accepting Felicity’s answer to his question wasn’t what he really wanted, but he also didn’t want to push or pressure her in any way. The silence stretched on for another moment, then he added, “You said we needed to continue our talk from last night?” Felicity nodded, grateful for the change in subject.

“I need you to know that when I’m hurting because I’m watching you struggle and I can’t do anything to help you, that doesn’t make it your fault,” she said. “There’s a difference between being in pain  _ for  _ you and being in pain  _ because _ of you. Do you understand?” There was a long silence before Oliver answered, “Yes” with something in his tone of voice that told Felicity that he wasn’t being entirely truthful. She sighed. They’d had this conversation- or at least one very like it- before, and they’d gotten past it, but now it seemed that they were back at square one.

_ Just like we’ve been with everything else lately _ , she thought bitterly.

“Are you alright?” Oliver asked, distracting her from her thoughts. She shrugged, which was the only answer she could give him at that moment.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud. “I guess it’s just… you won’t remember this, I’m sure, but that conversation we just had, about how it’s not your fault if I’m hurting out of empathy for something that happened to you… we’ve had it before, and we’d gotten past it. It’s frustrating to find ourselves back at square one.”

“Because it makes it feel like all the work we’ve put into healing from the trauma in our pasts and putting it behind us was for nothing,” Oliver murmured, finishing Felicity’s thought for her. She blinked, startled. 

“How did you know I was going to say that?” she asked, unable to keep herself from staring at him.

“Because I know you like I know my own name,” Oliver replied. “Or better, actually, it would seem, and that will never change, even when I’ve forgotten myself.” Felicity caught her breath. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, like the walls were closing in on her. She leapt up from the bed and paced back and forth for a moment, her feet tracing a tight, tense circuit in the space in front of the bed.

“Are you okay?” Oliver asked, frowning worriedly.

“I’m fine,” Felicity replied, idly wondering how many times he was going to ask her that question, considering that it felt like she should have been asking  _ him _ that. “I just… need a moment.” She continued pacing, trying to work off her sudden nervous energy. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver shift himself into an upright position on the bed to watch her as she went back and forth, and as he did so, she caught a glimpse of the tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, inked in bold black lines that stood out sharply against the tan of his skin. Without thinking, she reached out and grasped her right wrist in her opposite hand, rubbing her thumb idly back and forth across the inside of it as she paced. 

An instant later, Felicity gasped and stuttered to a halt, an idea coming to her suddenly, striking her like a bolt from the blue. Striding over to the small folding table where she’d set her phone the night before, she struggled for a moment to pick it up with shaking fingers before she managed to get ahold of it. Taking a moment to scroll through her contacts, she found the one she was looking for and sent them a text containing nothing other than a picture of the tattoo, identical to Oliver’s, on the inside of her wrist. The reply came a moment later.  _ Where are you? _

_ Gotham _ , Felicity wrote back.  _ Under Wayne Tower. _

Under _ Wayne Tower?  _ was the reply.

_ There’s no time to explain, _ Felicity typed out.  _ Please _ . This time, there was a long pause before she recieved a response.

_ Give me twenty-four hours _ , it read.

_ Please hurry _ , Felicity implored, but recieved no response. She could only hope that the person on the other end of the conversation had gotten the message.


	21. Arsenal Returns

Kate wasn’t sure what to make of Roy Harper, except that, in whatever strange way, he reminded her of Jason Todd. He came marching into the Cave two days after Kate, Felicity, and Oliver’s trip to the Hall of Justice without any explanation for his sudden presence other than that Felicity needed his help.

“Where is she?” he asked to that end, stopping in the middle of the Cave’s center platform and glancing around as if he expected her to suddenly appear within his view.

“I’m going to need you to give me a little more information than that,” Kate said, stepping into Roy’s path, not sure if the anger and defensiveness she was feeling was out of protectiveness for Felicity and Oliver and their privacy, or discomfort at having her space so abruptly and unceremoniously invaded. “First of all, how did you even know about this place?” She gestured broadly to indicate the entirety of the Cave. Roy snorted.

“I’m surprised that you seem to think that someone who’s friends with a former Robin  _ wouldn’t _ know about Bruce Wayne’s secret hideout,” he said, deadpan.

“Well, the whole  _ point _ of it being  _ secret _ is that no member of Bruce’s team ever shared details about his operation, so I can’t imagine  _ which _ former Robin would have told you…” Kate replied, trailing off as she pondered the question. After a moment, she asked “It was Jason, wasn’t it?” Roy’s only response was to nod. 

“You’ll have to tell me more about that later,” Kate said, “but right now it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t explain how you knew that Felicity needs your help.”

“Because I asked him for it.” Felicity’s voice came from behind them. Kate and Roy both turned toward the sound to see her rounding the corner hand in hand with Oliver, who trailed just behind her, somehow managing to loom protectively over her despite the distance. Roy cried out in shock at the sight of him.

“Oliver?” he asked. “He’s-”

“Yes, he’s alive,” Felicity interjected, clearly tired of having this exchange with every person they filled in on recent events, and Kate saw her hand tighten around his. “But there’s a problem.”

“And that is?” Roy asked, obviously still shaken.

“He’s lost his memory,” Felicity replied bluntly.

“A week ago, I woke up in a park with no memory of anything except Felicity’s name,” Oliver spoke up. “I don’t even know how I ended up in Gotham. Things have started coming back to me since then, but only in fragments.”

“I know you had some problems with your memory a few years back,” Felicity said, evidently before Roy could ask what that had to do with him, “and whatever trick Oliver showed you to help you get past them… I was hoping that you remember it well enough to do it for him, now.”

“I mean, I remember it, but I’m not sure it would help,” Roy replied, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “As I recall, it was meant more for recalling subconscious details of a  _ specific _ memory than anything else. I’m not sure it’s applicable to having no memory at all.”

“I’ve been having these...dreams,” Oliver put in. “Dreams that I’m pretty sure are really just the memories that my conscious mind can’t recall.”

“So what you’re saying is that you don’t think they’re  _ gone _ , just buried or kept from your conscious recall.” Oliver nodded.

“Okay,” Roy went on, in a tone of voice that implied that he was considering that information carefully, trying to determine how best to fit it into whatever strategy he came up with for dealing with the problem at hand going forward. “Well, have you had any of those dreams recently? As in, in the past couple of days?” Again, Oliver nodded.

“I had one last night,” he said. “About the Crisis.” If Roy was surprised by the fact that Oliver knew about an event he had no memory of, he didn’t show it. He probably assumed- and rightly so- that someone must have filled him in about it, at least as much as they could given the circumstances.

“Alright,” he said. “That’ll give us a starting point then, because if, like you said, the dreams you’ve been having are actually memories, then that one will be closest to the surface and will be the one we have the best chance of being able to bring back fully.” Oliver once more, but now he seemed cautious and unsure. Felicity, for her part, looked hopeful that what Roy was proposing might actually have a chance of working. Kate wished she could say that she shared that optimistic outlook. Much as she wanted to believe that they had a chance, none of them were psychologists. None of them had the knowledge base necessary to determine whether Roy’s trick would work, and try though she might, long, unfortunate experience had made it so that optimisim simply wasn’t in Kate’s nature. But she kept her doubts to herself. She didn’t want to take Felicity’s hope away from her. 

“How long will it take?” she asked instead. Roy shrugged. 

“Not more than a few minutes, if I remember correctly,” he said. Then, apparently as an afterthought, he added, “Whether or not it works.” 

“How soon can you get started?” Felicity asked, and Kate suppressed a wince at the eagerness in her voice. Perhaps it was time they had a conversation about managing expectations.

“Pretty soon,” Roy assured her. “There’s just a little set-up that needs to be done, and a few items I’ll need for that. It shouldn’t take me too long to get them though, and then we can start.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Kate cut in. “Just make a list of what you need, and I can get for you.” Much as she still had her doubts about whether this would work, she could sense that it was a matter that should be dealt with with some expediency. It would be quicker for her, a Gotham native who knew their way around the city, to fetch the items Roy needed than for him to do it himself.

“Thank you,” Roy said, though he seemed surprised by the offer. Maybe he’d somehow sensed Kate’s reluctance. 

“You don’t need to thank me,” she said. “I just think this will go faster if I go and get the stuff you need for you, since I’m sure I know Gotham better than you do.” 

“You’d be surprised,” Roy replied, “but I see what you’re saying. This seems like something we want to handle with urgency.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Kate replied. “So make your list, and let’s get this show on the road.”


	22. New Pain, Old Wounds

“What’s all this?” Oliver asked, walking into the living area once Roy had finished with his preparations to find him sitting cross legged on the floor, lit candles arranged in a wide circle around him.

“According to what you told me, there is something your mind is trying to tell you,” he said. “And I’m going to help you let it.”

“With candles?” Oliver asked, doing his best not to knock any of the objects in question over as he went to sit down across from Roy. He shook his head.

“With meditation,” he said. He paused, then asked “Do you trust me?” Oliver pondered that for a moment, then decided that since Felicity seemed to trust Roy, he could too, and answered, “Yes.”

“Good,” Roy said, nodding. “Close your eyes.” Oliver did as he said, plunging his world into darkness.

“Now focus on your breathing,” he heard Roy intone in a smooth, commanding voice. “In through your nose, out through your mouth.” Oliver did, and felt himself still, a deep calm stealing over him. “In. Out. Floating along, weightless. The only thing that exists is your breath. Now your thoughts are like clouds; they just drift away.” A pause, then, “Let go.” Oliver took a deep, slow breath in, then another one out. For a moment, he saw nothing but the darkness behind his closed eyelids. Then, in his mind’s eye, an image appeared- himself, perched on the edge of a bed that Felicity was lying in, his arm around her shoulders, smiling down at the newborn baby girl she held in her arms. He pressed a kiss against her cheek, feeling his heart swell with love and with joy, and the scene changed until he found himself standing on a platform in an underground bunker, face to face with a young woman with blue eyes like his and blonde hair like Felicity’s, the same young woman he had seen in his dream of the Crisis. Their daughter. He was sure of it. She had blood on her neck and tears glimmering in his eyes, and when she locked eyes with him and asked “Dad?” in a small, trembling voice, he felt as though his heart might shatter into a thousand tiny shards.

Oliver gasped, his eyes flying open, snapping out of his meditative trance in an instant.

“What is it?” Roy asked with a worried frown. “What did you see?”

“Where’s Felicity?” Oliver asked instead of answering. He heard the desperation, the fear, the brokenness in his voice, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to know about the memories that had just returned to him before he told anyone else. She deserved to be the first to know.

“She can’t have gone far,” Roy said, getting to his feet, seeming to sense the urgency in Oliver’s request. “I’ll go find her.” He disappeared around the corner, leaving Oliver alone for the moment. He found himself wringing his hands together in his lap while he waited for him to reappear with Felicity. He was anxious to tell her what he had just remembered, and he knew that she might be the only one with answers regarding what he was still confused about.

_ I have a daughter. _ The thought kept running through his mind on a loop. He simply could not let it go. He didn’t know if what he felt at the realization was shock or amazement or something else entirely, but whatever he was feeling, it was intense and nearly overwhelming. 

“Oliver?” he heard Felicity ask, pulling him away from his introspections. He looked over, and there she was, standing alone by the end of the privacy screen that stretched across the living space, fidgeting with her wedding ring and studying him with a concerned expression.

“We have a daughter,” Oliver said before she could ask what was going on. He saw her start at his words, but after a moment she recovered and said, “Yes. We do. Her name is Mia. It’s-”

“A shortened form of Moira,” Oliver interjected, the memory coming back to him. “My mother’s name.” Felicity nodded, looking shaken.

“Because she died,” Oliver went on. “She was killed, and I wanted to honor her somehow. To keep her memory alive.” He felt himself sway and then collapse, his legs buckling under the weight of his grief as the memory of that event returned to him anew to overwhelm him.

“Oliver!” Felicity cried, racing across the space between them to catch him before he hit the floor. Her voice dropping to a murmur, she added, “Oliver, your mother is alive. Remember I told you that she gave me that photo album? She’s alive. She’s back home in Star City taking care of Mia while I’m here.” Oliver shook his head. 

“No, no, that can’t be right,” he mumbled. “I remember I watched her die. Slade Wilson murdered her right in front of me.” Felicity shook her head.

“He tried,” she corrected gently. “He was about to, but you broke free of your bonds at the last second and stopped him. You  _ saved _ your mother, Oliver. You saved her. She’s alive, and she’s safe, and she’s alright.” Oliver just stared at her, wanting desperately to believe that what she was telling him was true but also unable to deny the truth of his own memories. After a long moment of silence, Felicity sighed.

“Here,” she said, dialing her phone. “I’ll prove it to you.” She lifted the phone to her ear and listened to it ring in silence for a few minutes before she said, “Moira, I’m going to put you on speaker. There’s someone here with me who needs to hear your voice.” She held her phone out flat in her hand and Oliver heard his mother’s voice, sounding slightly tinny, coming from its speakers. “Felicity? What on  _ earth _ is going on?”

“Mom?” Oliver asked, unable to keep his voice from trembling. He felt tears pricking his eyes and tried desperately to blink them away. 

“Oliver?” his mother asked. “Is that really you?”

“Yeah Mom, it’s me,” Oliver replied. “It’s really me.”

“It’s so good to hear your voice,” his mother said, and now she was the one who sounded as though they were on the edge of tears. “Felicity told me, before she left for Gotham, that you were alive, but I never thought…” She trailed off.

“You never thought you’d ever know for sure whether it was true,” Oliver finished for her. There was a rustle on the other end of the call, as if she were nodding in response to his statement.

“Mom, how… how are you alive?” Oliver asked after a moment. “Felicity told me that I saved you, but I- I remember watching Slade Wilson murder you right in front of me.” 

“Both of those things are true,” his mother told him, sounding shaken at the mention of the memory of her death.

“How?” Oliver asked. “How can that be possible?”

“I don’t really understand it myself, to be honest,” his mother replied. “The only thing I  _ do _ understand is that it’s… complicated, and I don’t think I’d be able to explain it. I’m sorry.” 

“That’s okay Mom,” Oliver reassured her. “Besides Felicity, I have at least two other geniuses here with me right now. I’m sure one of them will be able to help me understand what’s going on.”

“I’ll let you get to it then,” his mother said. “Goodbye, Oliver. Hopefully we’ll see each other in person soon.”

“Bye Mom,” Oliver replied, his voice hoarse, choked with emotion. Felicity ended the call, then looked to him and asked “What now?”

“Now I think it’s time that we figure out exactly why I seem to remember a different version of events than everyone else,” he replied, finding himself filled with apprehension at the very concept.


	23. Next Steps

“Are you sure you can’t stay?” Felicity asked. It had been a few hours since she’d relayed what memories had returned to Oliver to the others, and Roy was preparing to head back to Star City. “I’m sure there’s more you could help Oliver remember.” She could hear the eagerness in her voice, the hopefulness, but she didn’t see any reason why she  _ shouldn’t _ be hopeful. Already Roy had done so much more for Oliver than she’d ever dared to hope that he could.

“That meditation technique I went through with him really only works to help a person recall buried details of a specific memory,” Roy said, shaking his head, his tone regretful. “It won’t help bring his lost ones back. That process will have to happen on its own.”

“But it brought back his memories of Mia,” Felicity pointed out, not entirely sure why she was arguing the point. 

“Those memories were already on their way to returning because of his dream about the Crisis,” Roy replied. “All I did was help bring them to the surface.” He paused, then added, “I’m sorry. I really wish I could be of more help, but at the very least I’ve given Oliver the tools he needs to be able to help himself the next time he has one of those dreams.” Felicity nodded. 

“Take care of yourself out there,” she murmured, pulling Roy into a hug. “And give Thea my love. I know how busy the two of you have been planning your wedding.”

“Which is why I need to hurry home,” Roy replied, pulling away from Felicity. “There’s still a lot of work left for us to do.” With that, he turned away and headed for the elevator.

“Speaking of Thea,” Felicity called out as a thought occurred to her, stopping Roy in his tracks. When he turned to face her, she asked “Does she know? About her brother? Does she know that he’s alive?” Roy nodded.

“Moira told her,” he said. “She told us all, actually. Obviously there had to be an explanation for your sudden trip to Gotham, and I think she didn’t want to lie to us.” Felicity nodded.

“Thank her for me,” she said. “When you see her.” Roy nodded and continued on his earlier course toward the elevator, and a few minutes later he was gone. 

“Roy couldn’t stay?” Kate asked a few minutes later when Felicity entered the workstation, where she, Luke, and Barbara were for her, as it was the only truly neutral space in the Cave, in part because it was where they conducted the majority of their business.

“He had matters to attend to back in Star City,” Felicity said in answer to Kate’s question. “But he pointed something out to me, before he left.” 

“And that was?” Kate prompted.

“That he’s given Oliver the tools he needs to help himself the next time he has a dream like the one he had about the Crisis,” Felicity answered.

“So we’re thinking that those dreams are his missing memories trying to return, then?” Kate asked. Felicity nodded.

“I mean, keep in mind that by now we’ve determined that his memories aren’t actually missing, just buried and the connections between them severed,” Felicity pointed out, “but yes.”

“Well, it’s something, I guess,” Kate said. “Roy being able to give Oliver the tools to be able to help himself from here on out, I mean. But I’d be willing to hazard a guess that it wasn’t quite what you were hoping for.”

“Not exactly,” Felicity agreed. “But progress is progress, so I can’t be disappointed by the form it takes. After all, Oliver remembers our daughter now, and that’s no small thing.”

“He does?” Barbara spoke up at that, looking shocked. “How did  _ that _ come about?” 

“I’m not sure of the exact details,” Felicity replied, turning to her. “But Mia was in Oliver’s dream about the Crisis, and Roy’s meditation technique brought that memory to the surface, and that in turn triggered the return of the rest of his memories of her.” 

“Hmmm,” Barbara mumbled thoughtfully. “Well, I won’t pretend most of what’s going on here, but it sounds to me as though any progress is good progress, right?” Felicity nodded. 

“There’s one more thing,” she said. Turning back to Kate, she added, “And I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Well, that doesn’t bode well,” Kate replied apprehensively. “What is it?”

“Oliver didn’t remember that he saved his mother from Slade Wilson,” Felicity answered. “He remembered the original timeline, where he failed to do so. More and more, it’s looking as though  _ all  _ his memories are of the original timeline. I need you to have a talk with him about it.”

“And do what?” Kate asked skeptically. “Compare notes?” Felicity could tell that she was only partially serious, but she shook her head no anyway.

“If I remember correctly, you and the other paragons also only remember the original timeline, right?” she asked, trying her best not to sound as though she might be passing judgement on Kate for it. She knew that that particular subject was a bit of a sore one for the paragons. At least, it was for Barry, and she thought it best to approach it delicately in case it was for Kate as well.

“Right,” the person in question agreed, nodding in response to Felicity’s question. 

“Alright then,” Felicity said. “I was hoping that a talk with you might help Oliver… make sense of things.”

“But at the same time,” she went on after a moment, “I understand how it might be a difficult conversation for either or both of you, and I hate to think that I’m… throwing you into the deep end.”

“We’re not going to get anywhere with this by avoiding difficult conversations,” Kate replied, getting to her feet. “What matters is helping Oliver, not my personal comfort. I’ll go talk to him.” Felicity nodded gratefully.

“Thank you,” she murmured. 

“Don’t mention it,” Kate replied, stopping on her way past Felicity to reach out and give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Felicity jerked at her touch, surprised by the gesture, and she grimaced awkwardly.

“Wish me luck, I guess,” she mumbled, and then, with that, she was off.


End file.
